THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 


'Books  by  Grander  Matthews: 

ESSAYS  AND  CRITICISMS 
French  Dramatists  of  the  igth  Century 
Pen  and  Ink,  Essays  on  subjects  of  more 

or  less  importance 

Aspects  of  Fiction,  and  other  Essays 
The  Historical  Novel,  and  other  Essays 
Parts  of  Speech,  Essays  on  English 
The  Development  of  the  Drama 
Inquiries  and  Opinions 
The  American  of  the  Future,  and  other 

Essays 

Moliere,  His  Life  and  His  Works 
Gateways  to  Literature,  and  other  Essays 
Shakspere  as  a  Playwright  (»« preparation) 


Moliere,  His  Life  and  His  Works 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 


PROFESSOR    IN    COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY 

MEMBER    OF   THE    AMERICAN    ACADEMY 

OF  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1912 


Copyright,  1912,  by 
BRANDER  MATTHEWS 


Published  September,  1912 


CoHege 

'Library 


TO  THE  MEMORY  OF 

FRANCIS  DAVIS  MILLET 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I  Gateways  to  Literature 3 

II  The  Economic  Interpretation  of 

Literary  History 35 

III  In  Behalf  of  the  General  Reader  .     .  59 

IV  The  Duty  of  Imitation     .......  77 

V   The  Devil's  Advocate 93 

V I  Literary  Criticism  and  Book-Reviewing  1 1 5 

VII  Familiar  Perse »39 

VIII  French  Poets  and  English  Readers     .  189 

IX  A  Note  on  Anatole  France  ....  207 

X  Poe's  Cosmopolitan  Fame     ....  225 

XI  Fenimore  Cooper 243 

XII  Bronson  Howard 279 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 


[This  address  was  delivered  at  Columbia  University  on  Octo- 
ber 13,  1909,  as  the  first  of  a  series  of  Lectures  on  Literature.] 


I 

GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

i 

TWO  winters  ago  Columbia  University  in- 
vited its  teaching  staff,  its  students  and  its 
friends  to  a  series  of  lectures  which  set  forth  the 
essential  quality  and  the  existing  condition  of 
each  of  the  several  sciences ;  and  today  Columbia 
University  begins  another  series  of  lectures  de- 
voted to  a  single  one  of  the  arts, — the  art  of  Lit- 
erature. In  the  opening  decade  of  this  twentieth 
century,  when  the  triumphs  of  Science  are  exul- 
tant on  all  sides  of  us,  there  would  be  a  lack  of 
propriety  in  failing  to  acknowledge  its  power  and 
its  authority;  and  a  grosser  failure  would  follow 
any  attempt  to  set  up  Art  as  a  rival  over  against 
Science.  Art  and  Science  have  each  of  them 
their  own  field;  they  have  each  of  them  their  own 
work  to  do;  and  they  are  not  competitors  but 
colleags  in  the  service  of  humanity,  responding 
to  different  needs.  Man  cannot  live  by  Science 
alone,  since  Science  does  not  feed  the  soul;  and 
it  is  Art  which  nourishes  the  heart  of  man.  Sci- 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

ence  does  what  it  can;  and  Art  does  what  it 
must.  Science  takes  no  thought  of  the  individ- 
ual; and  individuality  is  the  essence  of  Art.  Sci- 
ence seeks  to  be  impersonal  and  it  is  ever 
struggling  to  cast  out  what  it  calls  the  personal 
equation.  Art  cherishes  individuality  and  is  what 
it  is  because  of  the  differences  which  distinguish 
one  man  from  another,  and  therefore  the  loftiest 
achievements  of  art  are  the  result  of  the  personal 
equation  raised  to  its  highest  power. 

Of  all  the  liberal  arts  Literature  is  the  oldest,  as 
it  is  the  most  immediate  in  its  utility  and  the 
broadest  in  its  appeal.  Better  than  any  of  its 
sisters  is  it  fitted  to  fulfil  the  duty  of  making  man 
familiar  with  his  fellows  and  of  explaining  him 
to  himself.  It  may  be  called  the  most  significant 
of  the  arts,  because  every  one  of  us,  before  we 
can  adjust  ourselves  to  the  social  order  in  which 
we  have  to  live,  must  understand  the  prejudices 
and  desires  of  others  and  also  the  opinions  these 
others  hold  about  the  world  wherein  we  dwell. 
Literature  alone  can  supply  this  understanding. 
The  other  arts  bring  beauty  into  life  and  help  to 
make  it  worth  living;  but  since  mankind  came 
down  from  the  family-tree  of  its  arboreal  ances- 
tors, it  is  Literature  which  has  made  life  possible. 
It  is  the  swiftest  and  the  surest  aid  to  a  wide  un- 
derstanding of  others  and  to  a  deep  understand- 
ing of  ourselves.  It  gives  us  not  only  knowledge 
4 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

but  wisdom ;  and  thereby  it  helps  to  free  us  from 
vain  imaginings  as  to  our  own  importance.  Ig- 
norance is  always  conceited,  since  it  never  knows 
that  it  knows  nothing;  and  even  knowledge  may 
be  puft  up  on  occasion,  since  it  knows  that  it 
knows  many  things;  but  wisdom  is  devoid  of 
illusion,  since  it  knows  how  little  it  ever  can 
know. 

The  poet  Blake  it  was  who  declared  that  we 
never  know  enough  unless  we  know  more  than 
enough; — and  who  of  us  is  ever  likely  to  attain 
to  that  altitude  of  comprehension  ?  After  all, 
even  the  most  protracted  investigation  of  fact 
and  the  most  incessant  meditation  on  truth  must 
be  circumscribed  by  the  brief  radius  of  human 
knowledge.  What  are  threescore  years  and  ten? 
What  is  a  century,  even?  And  as  time  pulses 
by,  ever  quickening  its  pace,  we  are  often  tempted 
to  echo  Lowell's  envious  ejaculation,  "What  a 
lucky  dog  Methuselah  was!  Nothing  to  know, 
and  nine  hundred  years  to  learn  it  in!" 

If  Literature  is  the  most  venerable  of  the  arts 
and  if  it  is  the  most  significant,  should  it  not  be 
approach!  with  the  outward  signs  of  reverence? 
When  we  stand  up  here  to  discuss  it,  to  declare 
its  importance  and  to  consider  its  purpose,  ought 
we  not  to  robe  ourselves  in  stately  academic  cos- 
tume and  to  don  gown  and  hood  that  the  noble 
theme  may  be  dealt  with  in  all  outward  respect? 

5 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

Buffon  was  so  possest  by  the  dignity  of  letters 
that  he  put  on  his  richest  garb,  with  lace  ruffles 
and  gem-studded  sword,  before  he  sat  him  down 
at  his  desk  to  labor  at  his  monumental  work; 
and  Machiavelli  also  arrayed  himself  "in  royal, 
courtly  garments,"  and  thus  worthily  attired  he 
made  his  "entrance  into  the  ancient  courts  of 
the  men  of  old." 

But  this  lordly  approach,  alluring  as  it  is,  is 
not  imperative,  for  Literature,  lofty  as  it  may  be 
at  times,  is  not  remote  and  austere.  At  its  best 
it  is  friendly  and  intimate.  It  is  not  for  holidays 
only  and  occasions  of  state;  it  is  for  every-day 
use.  It  is  not  for  the  wise  and  the  learned  only, 
but  for  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men.  It  provides 
the  simple  ballad  and  the  merry  folk-tale  that  live 
by  word  of  mouth  generation  after  generation  on 
the  lonely  hillside;  and  it  proffers  also  the  soul- 
searching  tragedy  which  grips  the  masses  in  the 
densely  crowded  city.  It  has  its  message  for  all, 
old  and  young,  rich  and  poor,  educated  and  ig- 
norant; and  it  is  supreme  only  as  it  succeeds  in 
widening  its  invitation  to  include  us  all.  At  one 
moment  it  brings  words  of  cheer  to  the  weak- 
kneed  and  the  down-hearted;  and  at  another  it 
stirs  the  strong  like  the  blare  of  the  bugle.  It 
has  as  many  aspects  as  the  public  has  many 
minds.  It  is  sometimes  to  be  recaptured  only  by 
diligent  scholarship  out  of  the  dust  of  the  ages; 
6 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

and  it  is  sometimes  to  be  discovered  amid  the 
fleeting  words  lavishly  poured  out  in  the  books 
of  the  hour,  in  the  magazines  and  even  in  the 
daily  journals.  It  may  be  born  of  a  chance  oc- 
casion and  yet  worthy  to  survive  thru  the  long 
ages— the  Gettysburg  address,  for  example,  and 
the  '  Recessional.' 


LITERATURE  is  now  what  it  was  in  the  past,  and 
it  will  be  in  the  future  what  it  is  now,  infinitely 
various  and  unendingly  interesting.  We  can 
venture  to  project  the  curve  of  its  advance  in  the 
years  to  come  only  after  we  have  graspt  what  it 
is  today;  and  we  can  perceive  clearly  its  full 
meaning  in  our  own  time  only  after  we  have  ac- 
quainted ourselves  with  its  manifold  manifesta- 
tions in  the  centuries  that  are  gone.  True  is  it 
that  literature  is  the  result  of  individual  effort  and 
that  its  sublimest  achievements  are  due  to  single 
genius;  and  yet  it  is  racial  also,  and  it  is  always 
stampt  with  the  seal  of  nationality,  which  is  the 
sum  total  of  myriads  of  individuals.  Literature 
is  ever  markt  with  the  image  and  superscription 
of  the  people  whose  ideas  it  exprest  and  whose 
emotions  it  voiced.  Races  struggle  upwards 
and  establish  themselves  for  a  little  while  and 
then  sink  back  helpless;  mighty  empires  rise  and 
7 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

fall,  one  after  another,  each  believing  itself  to  be 
destined  to  endure;  and  it  is  mainly  by  the  litera- 
ture they  may  chance  to  leave  behind  them  that 
they  are  rescued  from  oblivion.  What  do  we 
really  know  about  Assyria  and  about  Babylon? 
Where  are  the  cities  of  old  time  ?  Why  is  it  that 
we  can  see  Sparta  only  vaguely,  while  Athens 
towers  aloft  in  outline  we  all  recognize?  The 
massive  monuments  of  Egypt  persist  thru  thou- 
sands of  years,  but  the  souls  of  the  dwellers  in 
the  valley  of  the  Nile  are  not  known  to  us  as  we 
know  the  souls  of  the  Hebrews,  whom  they  took 
captive  and  whose  sacred  books  reveal  to  us  their 
uplifting  aspirations  and  their  unattained  ideals. 
We  can  extract  not  a  little  light  from  the  laws  of 
Rome,  but  not  so  much  as  we  can  derive  from 
the  minor  writings  of  the  Latins;  and  the  code 
which  is  known  as  the  "novels"  of  Justinian 
does  not  afford  us  as  much  illumination  as  the 
realistic  fiction  of  Petronius.  The  many  ruins  of 
Rome  are  restored  for  us  and  peopled  again  with 
living  men  and  women  only  when  we  read  the 
speeches  of  Cicero,  the  lyrics  of  Horace  and  the 
letters  of  Pliny. 

It  is  not  in  the  barren  annals  of  a  nation  that 
we  can  most  readily  discover  the  soul  of  a  race. 
Rather  is  it  in  those  lesser  works  of  the  several 
arts  in  which  the  men  of  old  revealed  themselves 
unconsciously  and  yet  amply.  The  records  of 
8 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

the  historians  and  the  codes  of  the  lawgivers  are 
assuredly  not  to  be  neglected,  but  they  are  not 
more  significant  than  the  unpretending  efforts  of 
forgotten  artists, — the  painters  of  the  Greek 
vases,  for  instance,  and  the  molders  of  the  Tan- 
agra  figurines.  The  idyls  of  Theocritus  are  not 
less  illuminating  than  the  orations  of  Demos- 
thenes or  the  tragedies  of  /Eschylus. 

Literature  is  precious  for  its  own  sake,  but  it 
has  ever  an  added  value  from  the  light  it  cannot 
help  casting  on  the  manners  and  the  customs 
which  disclose  the  indurated  characteristics  of  a 
people.  The  unmistakable  flavor  of  the  middle 
ages  lurks  in  the  etherealized  lyrics  of  the  Ger- 
man minnesingers  no  less  than  in  the  more  mun- 
dane  fabliaux  of  the  French  satirists.  We  cannot 
open  a  book,  even  if  it  shelters  only  evanescent 
fiction  aiming  solely  to  amuse  an  idle  hour, 
without  opening  also  a  window  on  a  civilization 
unlike  any  other;  and  he  would  be  a  traveler  of 
marvelous  ability  who  could  make  us  as  inti- 
mately acquainted  with  the  simple  rustics  of  the 
Black  Forest,  with  the  primitive  peasants  of  Sicily 
or  with  the  deserted  spinsters  of  New  England 
as  we  find  ourselves  after  we  have  read  a  volume 
or  two  by  Auerbach,  by  Verga  or  by  Miss  Wil- 
kins.  Some  of  us  there  are  who  love  literature 
all  the  more  because  it  can  catch  for  us  this  local 
color,  fixt  once  for  all,  and  because  it  can  pre- 

9 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

serve  for  us  this  flavor  of  the  soil,  this  intimate 
essence  of  a  special  place  and  of  a  special  period. 
"The  real  literature  of  an  epoch,"  so  Renan 
declared,  "is  that  which  paints  and  expresses  it," 
and  such  is  the  real  literature  of  a  race  also.  Per- 
haps the  epoch  is  most  completely  painted  and 
exprest  when  the  author  is  interpreting  the  life 
that  is  seething  about  him,  dealing  directly  with 
what  he  knows  best,  as  Plautus  has  preserved  for 
us  the  very  aroma  of  the  teeming  tenements  of 
the  Latin  metropolis,  as  Moliere  has  limned  for 
us  the  "best  society  "  of  France  under  Louis  XIV, 
and  as  Mark  Twain  has  set  before  us  the  simple 
ways  of  the  Mississippi  river-folk.  But,  after  all, 
this  does  not  matter  much ;  and  even  if  a  writer 
is  handling  a  theme  remote  from  his  own  experi- 
ence, he  is  still  painting  his  own  epoch  and  ex- 
pressing his  own  race,  altho  he  may  not  be  aware 
of  it.  Whatever  ineffectual  effort  he  may  make, 
no  man  can  step  off  his  shadow.  However  vio- 
lently he  seeks  to  escape,  he  is  held  fast  by  his 
heredity  and  his  environment.  '  Hamlet '  is  a 
tale  of  Denmark,  '  Romeo  and  Juliet'  is  a  tale  of 
Italy,  and  'Julius  Caesar'  is  a  tale  of  ancient 
Rome, — but  Shakspere  himself  was  an  Eliza- 
bethan Englishman;  and  these  tragic  master- 
pieces of  his  were  possible  only  in  the  scepter'd 
isle  set  in  the  silver  sea  in  the  spacious  days  of 
the  Virgin  Queen.  Racine  borrowed  his  stories 

10 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

from  Euripides,  persuading  himself  that  he  had 
been  able  to  make  the  old  Greek  drama  live 
again ;  but  his  '  Phedre '  and  his  '  Andromaque '  are 
French  none  the  less  and  they  are  stampt  with 
the  date  of  the  seventeenth  century.  So  abso- 
lutely do  they  belong  to  the  period  and  to  the 
place  of  their  author  that  Taine  insisted  that  these 
tragedies  of  Racine  could  best  be  performed  in 
the  court-costumes  and  in  the  full-bottomed  wigs 
of  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV,  since  only  thus  could 
they  completely  justify  themselves. 

in 

THIS  intimate  essence  of  nationality  is  evident 
not  only  in  the  thoughts  that  sustain  the  work 
of  the  artist  and  in  the  emotions  by  which  he 
moves  us,  it  may  be  discovered  also  in  his  style, 
in  his  use  of  words  to  phrase  his  thoughts  and 
to  voice  his  emotion,  in  the  pattern  of  his  com- 
position and  in  the  rhythm  of  his  sentences. 
The  way  in  which  he  links  paragraph  to  para- 
graph may  lead  us  back  to  his  birthplace  and  the 
stock  from  which  he  sprang.  We  can  catch  the 
accent  of  his  ancestors  in  the  rise  and  fall  of  his 
periods;  and  sometimes  it  seems  almost  as  tho 
his  many  forefathers  were  making  use  of  him  as 
their  amanuensis. 

Consider  Shakspere  and  Bacon,  and  set  them 

I! 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

over  against  each  other.  They  were  contempo- 
rary Englishmen,  alike  and  yet  unlike,  alert  and 
intelligent,  energetic  and  wise,  both  of  them,  yet 
with  a  different  wisdom,  masters  of  expression 
each  in  his  own  fashion,  and  possest  of  the  in- 
terpreting imagination.  When  our  attention  is 
called  to  it  by  Mr.  Havelock  Ellis,  we  cannot 
fail  to  find  that  Shakspere,  "with  his  gay  ex- 
travagance and  redundancy,  his  essential  ideal- 
ism, came  of  a  people  that  had  been  changed  in 
character  from  the  surrounding  stock  by  a  Cel- 
tic infolding,"  and  that  Bacon,  "with  his  in- 
stinctive gravity  and  temperance,  the  supprest 
ardor  of  his  aspiring  intellectual  passion,  his  tem- 
peramental naturalism,  was  rooted  deep  in  that 
East  Anglian  soil  which  he  had  never  so  much 
as  visited." 

To  seek  to  seize  these  subtler  differences,  due 
not  so  much  to  nationality  as  to  provinciality,  if 
the  word  may  be  thus  applied,  is  not  to  inquire 
too  curiously,  for  it  is  to  advance  in  knowledge 
and  to  draw  a  little  nearer  to  that  secret  of  genius 
which  must  remain  ever  the  inexplicable  result 
of  the  race,  the  individual,  and  the  opportunity. 
There  is  not  a  little  significance  in  Mr.  Ellis's  sug- 
gestion that  we  can  perceive  in  the  pages  of  Haw- 
thorne a  glamor  of  which  "the  latent  aptitude 
had  been  handed  on  by  ancestors  who  dwelt  on 
the  borders  of  Wales,"  whereas  Renan  came 

12 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

from  a  family  of  commingled  Gascon  and  Breton 
descent,  so  that  "in  the  very  contour  and  melody 
of  his  style  the  ancient  bards  of  Brittany  have 
joined  hands  with  the  tribe  of  Montaigne  and 
Brantome."  It  was  Comte  who  declared  that 
"humanity  is  always  made  up  of  more  dead  than 
living." 

There  is  significance  also  in  the  fact  that  the 
most  of  the  major  writers  of  Latin  literature  were 
not  Romans  by  birth  and  that  not  a  few  of  them 
were  Spaniards, — Seneca  for  one  and  Martial  for 
another.  Petronius  was  possibly  a  Parisian;  and 
the  mother  of  Boccaccio  was  probably  a  French 
woman.  It  is  to  be  noted  also  that  Ruteboeuf, 
Villon,  Regnier,  Scarron,  Moliere,  Boileau,  La 
Bruyere,  Regnard,  Voltaire,  Beaumarchais,  Be- 
ranger,  and  Labiche  were  all  of  them  natives  of 
Paris.  Who  can  dispute  the  deduction  that  cer- 
tain of  the  dominant  characteristics  of  French 
literature  may  be  due  to  the  circumstance  that  so 
many  of  its  leaders  were  born  in  the  streets  of 
the  city  by  the  Seine?  May  not  this  be  one  of 
the  causes  of  that  constant  urbanity  which  is  the 
distinguishing  note  of  the  best  French  authors? 
May  it  not  be  one  of  the  reasons  for  that  unfail- 
ing regard  for  his  readers  and  that  incessant  ef- 
fort to  gage  their  capacity  which  possess  the 
French  men  of  letters? 

That  accomplisht  scholar,  Gaston  Boissier,  did 

13 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

not  hesitate  to  assert  that  he  wrote  not  for  his 
fellow-investigators,  but  for  the  general  reader. 
This  is  what  all  French  authors  have  done  when 
they  have  preserved  the  true  Parisian  tradition. 
They  have  willingly  renounced  overt  individual- 
ity and  they  have  shrunk  from  a  self-expression 
which  they  could  not  transmit  without  the  risk 
of  shocking — or  at  least,  of  annoying — those  to 
whom  they  were  talking,  pen  in  hand.  They 
accepted  the  wholesome  restraints  of  the  rules  of 
art,  which,  so  M.  Faguet  has  maintained,  "are 
all  of  them  counsels  of  perfection,  allowing  every 
exception  which  good  taste  will  justify, — from 
which  it  results  that  the  one  important  rule  is  to 
have  good  taste. "  The  value  of  good  taste  in  liter- 
ature will  be  strikingly  revealed  to  any  one  who 
comes  from  the  profitable  pleasure  of  reading 
Boissier's '  End  of  Paganism, '  with  its  rich  scholar- 
ship, its  large  and  penetrating  wisdom,  its  gentle 
urbanity  and  its  ripe  ease  of  style,  to  take  up  Pater's 
'Plato  and  Platonism,'  thin  and  brittle  in  its  tem- 
per, artificial  and  affected  in  its  manner,  and,  in 
a  word,  self-conscious  and  berouged.  Still  may 
we  hail  France  in  the  words  of  the  Scotchman, 
Buchanan: 

At  tu,  beata  Gallia, 
Salve,  bonarum  blanda  nutrix  artium. 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 


IV 

THERE  is  ever  profit  in  this  effort  to  seize  the 
potent  influence  of  heredity  and  environment 
even  upon  the  genius  who  may  seem  at  first 
glance  to  be  the  least  controlled  in  the  exuber- 
ance of  his  personality.  We  have  graspt  a  true 
talisman  of  artistic  appreciation  when  we  com- 
pare the  practical  common  sense  and  the  aus- 
tere gravity  of  the  Roman  with  the  inexhaust- 
ible curiosity  and  the  open-minded  intelligence 
of  the  Greek,  and  when  we  contrast  the  restrain- 
ing social  instinct  of  the  French  with  the  domi- 
neering energy  of  the  English.  But  however 
interesting  may  be  this  endeavor  to  perceive  the 
race  behind  the  individual  and  to  force  it  to  help 
explain  him,  there  are  other  ways  not  less  in- 
structive of  seeking  an  insight  into  literature. 

We  can  confine  our  attention,  if  we  please,  to 
a  chosen  few  of  the  greatest  writers,  the  men  of 
an  impregnable  supremacy.  We  can  neglect  the 
minor  writings  even  of  these  masters  to  center 
our  affections  on  their  acknowledged  master- 
pieces. We  may  turn  aside  from  the  authors 
individually,  however  mighty  they  may  be,  and 
from  their  several  works,  however  impressive, 
to  consider  the  successive  movements  which  one 
after  the  other  have  changed  the  stream  of  liter- 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

ature,  turning  it  into  new  channels  and  sweep- 
ing along  almost  every  man  of  letters,  powerless 
to  withstand  the  current.  We  may  perhaps  pre- 
fer to  abandon  the  biographical  aspects  of  litera- 
ture to  investigate  its  biological  aspects  and  to 
consider  the  slow  differentiation  of  the  several 
literary  species,  history  from  the  oration,  for  ex- 
ample, and  the  drama  from  the  lyric.  Or,  finally, 
we  may  find  interest  in  tracing  the  growth  of 
those  critical  theories  about  literary  art  which 
have  helped  and  which  have  hindered  the  free 
expansion  of  the  author's  genius  at  one  time  or 
at  another.  There  are  many  different  ways  of 
penetrating  within  the  open  portals  of  literature. 
All  of  them  are  inviting;  all  of  them  will  lead  a 
student  to  a  garden  of  delight;  and  which  one 
of  them  a  man  may  choose  will  depend  on  his 
answer  to  the  question  whether  he  is  more  in- 
terested in  persons,  or  in  things,  or  in  ideas. 

There  is  unfading  joy  in  a  lasting  friendship 
with  a  great  writer,  whether  it  is  Aristotle,  "the 
master  of  all  that  know,"  or  Sophocles,  who 
"saw  life  steadily  and  saw  it  whole,"  or  Dante, 
who  "wandered  thru  the  realms  of  gloom,"  or 
Milton,  the  "God-given  organ-voice  of  England." 
Such  a  friendship  brings  us  close  to  a  full  mind 
and  to  a  noble  soul.  And  such  a  friendship  can 
be  had  only  in  return  for  loyal  service,  for  a 
strenuous  resolve  to  spare  nothing  needed  for  full 
16 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

appreciation  of  the  master's  genius.  A  friendly 
familiarity  with  an  author  of  cosmopolitan  fame 
can  be  achieved  only  by  wide  wanderings  to  and 
fro  here  and  therein  the  long  centuries  in  search 
of  the  predecessors  whom  he  followed,  the  con- 
temporaries to  whom  he  addrest  his  message, 
and  the  successors  who  followed  the  path  he  had 
been  the  first  to  tread.  Wisely  selected,  by  an 
honest  exercise  of  our  own  taste,  a  single  author 
may  serve  as  a  center  of  interest  for  the  loving 
study  of  a  lifetime.  Lowell  found  that  his  pro- 
found admiration  for  Dante  pleasantly  persuaded 
him  to  studies  and  explorations  of  which  he  little 
dreamt  when  he  began.  A  desire  to  understand 
Moliere  will  lead  an  admirer  of  that  foremost  of 
comic  dramatists  to  investigate  the  history  of 
comedy  in  Greece  and  Rome,  in  Spain  and  Italy, 
and  to  trace  out  the  enduring  influence  of  the 
great  French  playwright  on  the  later  comedy  of 
France,  England  and  Germany;  it  will  also  tempt 
him  into  unexpected  by-paths,  whereby  he  may 
acquire  information  about  topics  seemingly  as 
remote  as  the  Jesuit  methods  of  education,  as 
Gassendi's  revival  of  the  atomic  theories  of  Lu- 
cretius, and  as  the  practice  of  medicine  in  the 
seventeenth  century. 

Closely  akin  to  this  devotion  to  one  of  the 
mighty  masters  of  literature  is  the  concentration 
of  our  interest  on  a  single  literary  masterpiece. 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

We  may  prefer  to  fill  our  ears  with  "the  surge 
and  thunder  of  the  Odyssey  "  or  to  recall  the  in- 
terlinked tales  "of  the  golden  prime  of  good 
Haroun  al  Raschid."  We  may  find  ample  satis- 
faction in  following  the  footsteps  of  one  or  an- 
other of  the  largely  conceived  cosmopolitan 
characters,  figures  which  have  won  favor  far 
beyond  the  borders  of  their  birthplace.  Some  of 
these  heroic  strugglers  live  only  in  the  language 
which  they  lispt  at  first,  while  others  have  gone 
forth  to  wander  from  one  land,  one  literature,  one 
art,  that  they  may  tarry  awhile  in  other  lands, 
other  literatures  and  other  arts. 

After  all  his  travels  Ulysses  abides  with  his  own 
people;  the  gaunt  profile  of  Don  Quixote  still 
projects  itself  against  the  sharp  hills  of  Spain; 
and  Falstaff  is  at  home  only  in  the  little  island 
where  he  blustered  boldly  and  breezily.  But 
Faust  is  a  seedling  of  one  soil  transplanted  into 
another  where  he  struck  down  deeper  roots  only 
to  tower  aloft  again  in  the  land  of  his  origin. 
And  Don  Juan,  the  lyrical  hero  of  a  mystical  Span- 
ish legend,  tarried  in  Italy,  before  he  was  re- 
ceived in  France,  where  he  was  transformed  into 
the  implacable  portrait  of  "a  great  lord  who  is  a 
wicked  man."  And  from  the  French  drama  '  Don 
Juan '  strays  into  English  poetry  and  into  German 
music;  so  Faust,  born  obscurely  in  Germany, 
has  ventured  from  English  poetry  into  German 
18 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

drama  and  French  music.  It  is  well  for  the  arts 
that  there  is  and  always  has  been  free  trade  in 
their  raw  materials  and  that  no  custom-house  can 
take  toll  on  the  ideas  which  one  nation  sends  to 
another  to  be  workt  up  into  finisht  products. 
From  race  to  race,  from  century  to  century,  from 
art  to  art,  there  is  unceasing  interchange  of  intel- 
lectual commodities;  and  no  inspired  statistician 
can  strike  the  balance  of  this  international  trade 
whereby  men  are  enabled  to  nourish  their  souls. 
Nor  are  these  brave  figures  the  sole  travelers 
whose  wanderings  we  may  trace  from  one  liter- 
ature to  another,  subduing  their  native  accents  to 
new  tongues.  Even  humbler  characters  may 
bear  a  charmed  life;  and  the  intriguing  slave  of 
Greek  comedy  was  taken  over  by  the  Latins,  to 
revive  after  a  slumber  of  more  than  a  thousand 
years  in  the  Italian  comedy-of-masks  and  in  the 
Spanish  comedy  of  cloak-and-sword,  from  which 
he  slept  forth  gaily  to  disguise  himself  as  the 
Mascarille  and  the  Scapin  of  Moliere,  and  as  the 
Figaro  of  Beaumarchais,  of  Mozart,  and  of  Rossini. 


ALTHO  many  lovers  of  letters  may  be  tempted 
to  devote  themselves  mainly  to  the  masters  and 
to  the  masterpieces  of  literature  and  to  the  peren- 
nial types  which  literature  has  seen  fit  to  pre- 

19 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

serve  thru  the  ages,  there  are  other  students  who 
will  find  their  profit  in  fixing  their  attention 
rather  on  the  several  movements  which  have 
modified  literary  endeavor.  Even  today  one  can- 
not help  perceiving  the  persistence  of  the  irre- 
pressible conflict  between  the  idealsof  the  Greeks, 
who  sought  for  beauty  always,  and  the  ideals  of 
the  Jews,  who  set  aloft  duty.  Hellenism  swept 
swiftly  from  Athens  to  Rome  and  then  to  all  the 
shores  of  the  Mediterranean,  until  it  spent  its 
force  and  finally  found  itself  desiccated  into  Alex- 
andrianism.  Then,  in  its  turn,  the  Hebraic  spirit, 
softened  by  Christianity,  spread  abroad  from  dis- 
tant and  despised  Palestine  until  it  attained  to 
the  uttermost  boundaries  of  the  wide-flung  Ro- 
man empire.  The  influence  of  these  contending 
ideals  is  still  evident  in  this  twentieth  century  of 
ours,  especially  in  the  obvious  cleavage  between 
the  artistic  aspirations  of  the  races  of  Romance  ori- 
gin and  those  of  the  peoples  of  Teutonic  stock. 
Certain  of  the  less  admirable  consequences  of 
a  narrow  acceptance  of  the  Hebraic  doctrines  re- 
vealed themselves  in  the  misguided  asceticism  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  thereby  making  easier  the  early 
triumphs  of  the  Renascence,  which  was  in  its 
essence  an  effort  to  recapture  the  joyous  liberty 
of  the  Greeks.  The  new  learning,  with  its  redis- 
covery of  the  wisdom  of  the  ancients,  was  indeed 
a  new  birth  for  the  arts,  and  not  the  least  for 

20 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

literature.  Man  came  into  his  own  once  again, 
and  he  was  in  haste  to  express  himself.  He  drew 
a  long  breath  and  felt  at  last  free  to  live.  As  was 
inevitable,  he  pusht  back  the  limits  of  liberty  un- 
til he  sometimes  attained  an  unworthy  and  un- 
wholesome license.  His  new  knowledge  made 
him  arrogant  and  intolerant;  and  he  was  ready 
to  reject  all  restraint.  Yet  in  time  he  was  able 
to  recover  not  a  little  of  the  harmony  and  of  the 
proportion  which  had  characterized  the  great 
Greeks,  even  if  he  never  quite  attained  to  their 
simplicity  and  to  their  sympathy. 

Then  the  reaction  came  at  last,  and  just  as  Hel- 
lenism had  shriveled  up  into  Alexandrianism, 
so  the  Renascence  in  its  turn  dried  up  into  the 
empty  and  formal  Classicism  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  with  its  code  of  rules  for  every  art. 
Classicism  lost  its  grasp  on  the  realities  of  life 
and  it  cheated  itself  with  words.  It  kept  the 
letter  of  the  law  and  refused  to  conform  to  its 
spirit.  It  sterilized  the  vocabulary  of  verse.  It 
left  the  poet  with  no  fit  instrument  for  the  wire- 
less communication  of  emotion.  In  England  it 
gave  us  the  poetry  of  Alexander  Pope  and  the 
criticism  of  Samuel  Johnson.  In  France  it  codi- 
fied the  regulations  which  were  responsible  for  a 
long  succession  of  lifeless  tragedies.  And  by  its 
emphasis  upon  legislation  to  curb  literature  it 
brought  about  the  reaction  of  the  Romanticists. 
21 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

who  succeeded  only  in  the  negative  work  of  de- 
struction and  who  failed  lamentably  to  establish 
their  more  positive  contentions. 

Romanticism  flourish!  contemporary  with  the 
American  revolution  and  the  French;  and  in  all 
its  manifestoes  there  rings  the  tocsin  of  revolt. 
It  promulgates  its  declaration  of  the  Rights  of 
Man  in  the  domain  of  art;  and  it  tends  to  a  stark 
individualism  leading  straight  to  the  anarchy 
which  refuses  to  acknowledge  any  check  upon 
the  caprice  of  the  moment.  It  exalts  the  illegal, 
the  illegitimate  and  the  illicit.  It  glorifies  the 
outlaw  and  the  outcast;  and  it  relishes  the  ab- 
normal rather  than  the  normal,  the  morbid  rather 
than  the  healthy.  The  violence  and  extravagance 
of  the  Romanticism  of  Victor  Hugo,  for  example, 
made  inevitable  the  Realism  of  Turgenef  and  Mr. 
Howells.  The  principle  of  art  for  art's  sake, 
which  the  French  Romanticists  took  for  a  battle- 
cry  and  which  is  stimulating  if  it  is  properly 
understood,  is  pernicious  when  it  is  misread  to 
mean  that  the  artist  has  no  moral  responsibility. 
Life  is  influenced  by  literature  as  much  as  litera- 
ture is  influenced  by  life.  Many  a  suicide  in 
Germany  was  the  result  of  Werther's  self-pity- 
ing sorrows;  and  many  a  young  man  in  France 
took  pattern  by  Balzac's  sorry  heroes. 

As  instructive  as  any  study  of  these  successive 
literary  movements  is  an  inquiry  into  the  several 

22 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

literary  species,  with  due  consideration  of  their 
evolution,  their  permanence,  and  their  occasional 
commingling  one  with  another.  There  is  a 
special  pleasure  in  tracing  the  development  of 
oratory,  for  example,  from  the  days  of  the  Greeks 
down  to  our  own  time,  deducing  its  essential 
and  eternal  principles,  and  weighing  the  influ- 
ence of  Demosthenes  on  Cicero  and  of  both  on 
Bossuet  and  on  Daniel  Webster.  There  is  an 
equal  profit  in  observing  how  history  has  been 
able  to  separate  itself  from  oratory  on  the  one  hand 
and  from  the  epic  on  the  other.  A  most  inter- 
esting illustration  of  the  progress  from  the  hetero- 
geneous to  the  homogeneous  is  to  be  found  in 
the  evolution  of  Athenian  tragedy,  which  included 
at  first  much  that  was  not  strictly  dramatic.  It 
developed  slowly  out  of  the  lyric;  and  in  the  be- 
ginning it  contained  choral  dances,  epic  narratives 
and  descriptive  passages.  Amid  these  confused 
elements  it  is  not  always  easy  to  seize  the  essen- 
tial action  of  the  drama.  But  as  Greek  tragedy 
grew  it  came  slowly  to  a  consciousness  of  itself, 
and  it  eliminated  one  by  one  these  non-dramatic 
accessories,  until  at  last  we  find  only  a  story 
shown  in  action  and  represented  by  a  group  of 
characters  immeshed  in  an  inexorable  struggle. 
A  parallel  development  took  place  a  little  later  in 
the  Greek  comic  drama,  whereby  the  lyrical-bur- 
lesque of  Aristophanes  became  the  more  prosaic 

23 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

comedy  of  Menander;  the  earlier  conglomerate 
of  incongruous  elements  discarded  one  by  one 
its  soaring  lyrics,  its  personal  lampooning  and  its 
license  of  political  satire,  while  at  the  same  time  it 
steadily  strengthened  the  supporting  plot,  with 
the  appropriate  interrelation  of  character  and 
situation. 

No  literary  species  has  had  a  more  unexpected 
and  a  more  unprecedented  prosperity  than  the 
novel  in  prose,  which  in  the  nineteenth  century 
became  the  most  popular  of  forms,  essayed  by 
many  a  writer  who  possest  only  a  small  share 
of  the  native  gift  of  story-telling.  The  novel  is 
almost  the  only  one  of  the  literary  species  that 
the  Greeks  of  the  Golden  Age  did  not  develop 
and  carry  to  a  perfection  which  is  the  despair  of 
all  later  men  of  letters.  They  seem  to  have 
cared  little  for  prose-fiction;  and  when  they  had 
a  story  to  tell  they  set  it  forth  in  verse,  inspired 
by  the  muse  of  epic  poetry.  Today  that  forsaken 
maiden  can  find  work  fit  for  her  hands  only  by 
laying  aside  her  singing-robes  and  condescend- 
ing to  bare  prose. 

Two  of  the  foremost  of  modern  masters  of 
prose-fiction,  Cervantes  and  Fielding,  have 
claimed  that  their  stories  were,  in  very  truth,  epics 
in  prose.  On  the  other  hand,  George  Meredith 
seems  to  consider  the  novel  to  be  derived  rather 
from  comedy;  and  there  is  no  question  that  the 
24 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

expansion  of  prose-fiction  was  aided  also  by  the 
delicate  work  of  the  seventeenth-century  charac- 
ter-writers and  of  the  eighteenth-century  essay- 
ists. We  may,  if  we  choose,  declare  that  the 
series  of  papers  in  which  Steele  and  Addison 
sketched  the  character  and  the  career  of  Sir  Roger 
de  Coverley  was  in  fact  the  earliest  of  serial 
stories.  In  literature,  as  in  life,  he  is  a  wise  child 
who  knows  his  own  father;  and  a  writer  may 
have  supposed  himself  to  be  a  nameless  orphan 
when  in  reality  he  is  the  missing  heir  of  many 
honorable  ancestors. 

Prose-fiction  may  be  the  offspring  of  the  epic 
and  it  may  have  received  a  rich  legacy  from  the 
essay;  but  it  has  grown  to  maturity  under  the 
guardianship  of  the  drama,  and  in  the  closest 
comradeship  with  both  comedy  and  tragedy. 
The  earlier  novelists,  Cervantes  and  Le  Sage  and 
Fielding,  had  all  begun  as  playwrights;  so  also 
had  the  later  Hugo  and  Dumas.  The  influence 
of  Corneille  and  Racine  on  Mme.  de  La  Fayette 
is  as  indisputable  as  the  influence  of  Moliere  on 
Le  Sage  and  of  Ben  Jonson  on  Dickens.  And 
since  it  has  become  the  dominant  literary  form, 
the  novel  has  in  its  turn  served  as  a  stimulant  to 
the  drama.  There  is  no  difficulty  in  tracing  the 
impression  made  by  '  Gil  Bias '  on  the  '  Manage 
de  Figaro'  and  by  'Gotz  von  Berlichingen'  on 
'Ivanhoe.'  Nor  can  any  disinterested  inquirer 
25 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

dispute  that  the  social  dramas  of  Dumas  fits  and 
of  Augier  are  deeply  indebted  to  the  'Human 
Comedy '  of  Balzac,  and  that  the  earlier  comedies 
of  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  and  Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones 
owe  much  to  the  mixture  of  humor  and  pathos 
to  be  found  in  the  pages  of  Dickens  and  Thack- 
eray. 

VI 

ONCE,  when  an  American  painter  in  Rome  was 
told  by  a  purse-proud  picture-buyer  that  she  did 
not  pretend  to  know  anything  about  art,  but  she 
did  know  what  she  liked,  the  irritated  artist  could 
not  repress  the  swift  retort,  "So  do  the  beasts 
of  the  field!"  To  know  what  we  like  is  only 
the  beginning  of  wisdom;  and  we  ought  to  be 
able  to  give  good  reason  for  the  faith  that  is  in 
us.  The  French,  who  are  subtly  curious  in  their 
use  of  words,  make  a  useful  distinction  between 
a.  gourmet,  the  delicate  taster,  and  a.  gourmand, 
the  gross  feeder;  and  the  distinction  holds  in  lit- 
erature as  well  as  in  life.  The  wise  Goethe  tells 
us  that  "there  are  three  classes  of  readers, — some 
enjoy  without  judgment,  some  judge  without 
enjoyment;  some  there  are  who  judge  while  they 
enjoy,  and  who  enjoy  while  they  judge."  It  is 
within  our  power  always  to  gain  admittance  into 
this  third  group  and  to  attain  a  reasoned  appre- 
ciation of  the  authors  whose  writings  we  relish. 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

Indeed,  we  may  even  acquire  an  open-mind- 
edness  which  will  carry  us  a  little  further  until 
we  can  understand  how  it  is  that  sometimes  we 
admire  what  we  do  not  personally  enjoy,  and 
that  on  other  occasions  we  may  for  the  moment 
find  pleasure  in  what  we  do  not  greatly  admire. 
We  can  learn  to  control  our  likings;  and  in  time 
we  can  correct  our  instinctive  tendency  to  let  our 
personal  preferences  erect  themselves  into  eter- 
nal standards.  Of  course,  these  personal  pref- 
erences must  ever  be  the  basis  of  our  ultimate 
judgments,  since  we  are  born  always  with  a  bias 
in  favor  of  one  school  or  of  the  other.  Our  na- 
tive tendency  is  toward  the  ancient  or  toward 
the  modern,  and  we  are  by  instinct  either  roman- 
ticists or  realists,  whether  we  are  conscious  of  this 
prejudice  or  not.  Our  opinion  may  be  as  the 
leaves  that  change  color  with  the  revolving  sea- 
sons, but  our  principles  are  rooted  in  us.  It  is 
fate  rather  than  free  will,  which  decides  for  us 
in  which  camp  we  will  find  ourselves  enlisted. 
Before  we  were  born  it  was  settled  for  each  of 
us,  once  for  all,  whether  we  should  delight  in 
the  massive  simplicity  of  the  Attic  dramatists, 
with  their  unerring  union  of  a  content  of  high 
value  with  a  form  that  seems  to  be  inevitable;  or 
whether  we  should  revel  rather  in  the  rich  lux- 
uriance and  bold  energy  of  the  Elizabethans, — 
the  one  moving  majestically  with  the  sweep  of 
27 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

a  glacier,  and  the  other  boiling  over  with  the  im- 
patience of  a  volcano. 

But  even  if  we  cannot  help  being  partizans,  we 
ought  to  strive  to  master  our  prejudices  so  that 
we  may  learn  at  least  to  understand  the  spirit  of 
the  masterpieces  wrought  by  those  with  whom 
we  are  not  in  accord.  The  critic  needs  not  only 
insight  and  equipment;  his  task  calls  also  for 
sympathy  and  for  disinterestedness.  The  code 
of  criticism  is  not  as  the  law  of  the  Medes  and 
Persians  which  alterethnot;  it  changes  from  race 
to  race  and  from  epoch  to  epoch;  it  is  modified 
by  the  successive  movements  of  human  feeling 
and  of  human  thought. 

The  scholars  of  the  Renascence,  secure  in  their 
inheritance  of  Greek  wisdom,  had  a  sublime  be- 
lief in  the  comprehensiveness  and  in  the  certainty 
of  their  knowledge;  but  now  in  this  new  twen- 
tieth century  of  ours  we  moderns — 

Whom  vapors  work  for,  yet  who  scorn  a  ghost, 
Amid  enchantments,  disenchanted  most, — 

we  are  at  last  aware  that  we  are  but  peering  thru 
a  chance  crack  in  the  dark  wall  which  shuts  us 
in,  and  that  we  can  only  glimpse  a  fragment  of 
knowledge,  glad  that  even  so  little  is  granted 
to  us.  We  have  surrendered  the  hope  of  ever 
attaining  final  truth;  but  none  the  less  are  we  still 
nerved  by  the  longing  for  it.  Perhaps  there  are 
28 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

not  a  few  who  would  echo  Lessing's  proud  dec- 
laration that  he  valued  the  privilege  of  seeking 
the  truth  above  the  actual  possession  of  it. 

Criticism  must  needs  lag  behind  creation,  even 
if  literary  criticism  may  be  also  creation  itself  in 
its  own  fashion.  The  critic  cannot  do  his  work 
until  after  the  lyrist  and  the  dramatist  and  the 
orator  have  done  theirs.  It  is  on  them  that  he 
feeds,  and  from  their  unconscious  practice  he  de- 
rives his  reasoned  principles.  In  fact,  it  is  only 
when  the  earlier  impulse  of  poetry  was  beginning 
to  slacken  a  little,  that  the  critic  came  forward  to 
undertake  his  parasitic  task.  He  felt  it  to  be  his 
duty — as  indeed  it  is — to  apply  to  the  present  the 
standards  of  the  past;  and  it  was  long  before  he 
was  willing  to  recognize  the  possibilities  that 
these  standards  might  be  found  in  the  living  lan- 
guages as  well  as  in  the  dead. 

Apparently  the  earliest  attempt  to  hold  up  a 
modern  author  as  worthy  of  detailed  study  was 
in  the  fourteenth  century,  when  Boccaccio  began 
his  lectures  on  Dante;  and  so  late  as  the  middle 
of  the  eighteenth  century,  when  Gray  was  ap- 
pointed to  a  chair  of  Modern  Literature  and  Lan- 
guages at  Cambridge,  he  did  not  feel  himself 
bound — so  Lowell  noted — to  perform  "any  of  its 
functions  except  that  of  receiving  his  salary." 
Yet,  even  then,  Lessing  had  already  conceived 
of  literature  as  a  single  whole,  however  multi- 
29 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

form  its  manifestations  might  be  in  many  tongues. 
Lessing  is  the  first  of  modern  critics,  as  he  is  the 
foremost;  and  he  pointed  out  the  path  of  prog- 
ress to  Sainte-Beuve,  to  Taine,  and  to  Brunetiere. 
It  is  due  to  their  investigation  into  the  laws  that 
govern  the  evolution  of  literature  that  the  atti- 
tude of  criticism  is  now  more  tolerant  and  indeed 
more  modest  than  it  was  when  Ronsard  felt  him- 
self authorized  to  speak  of  the  "naive  facility  "  of 
Homer,  and  when  Milton,  with  all  his  admira- 
tion, deemed  that  Shakspere  "warbled  native 
woodnotes  wild."  Thoreau  anticipated  our  later 
opinion  when  he  asserted  that  "in  Homer  and  in 
Chaucer  there  is  more  of  the  serenity  and  inno- 
cence of  youth  than  in  the  more  modern  and 
moral  poets." 

Brunetiere  was  perhaps  the  most  suggestive  of 
recent  literary  critics,  abounding  in  fertile  gen- 
eralizations, and  applying  to  art  ideas  supplied  by 
science.  Here  he  was  following  Taine  rather  than 
Sainte-Beuve,  who  was  more  keenly  interested 
in  the  idiosyncrasies  of  individual  authors  than 
in  the  larger  movements  of  literature.  Sainte- 
Beuve  preferred  to  give  us  "biographic  psychol- 
ogy," to  borrow  Taine's  apt  phrase.  Yet  even  in 
criticism  there  are  few  real  novelties;  Sidney's'  De- 
fence of  Poesy,'  for  example,  is  imitated  from  the 
Italians;  Taine's  theory  of  the  influence  of  heredity 
and  environment  is  amplified  from  Hegel;  and  the 
3° 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

objections  which  adverse  critics  have  brought 
against  the  veracious  realism  of  Mr.  Howells  are 
curiously  akin  to  those  that  Petronius  urged 
against  the  Roman  poet,  possibly  Lucan,  who 
had  ventured  to  write  an  epic  in  which  there  was 
less  inventive  exuberance  and  more  interpreta- 
tive imagination.  Gaston  Boissier  even  dis- 
covered a  vague  premonition  of  the  struggle-for- 
life  theory  in  Saint  Augustine's  'City  of  God/ 

VII 

TIME  was  when  man  lived  in  a  cave  until  he 
learnt  how  to  put  together  a  wooden  frame  for  a 
more  commodious  dwelling;  then  after  a  while 
he  filled  up  this  framework  with  the  bricks  he  had 
found  out  how  to  bake,  and  traces  of  this  tempo- 
rary device  are  still  evident  in  the  decorations  of 
the  later  and  loftier  temples  which  the  Greeks 
built  of  marble.  Only  of  late  has  man  gone  back 
to  the  primitive  frame,  putting  it  together  now, 
not  with  wood  but  with  wrought  steel;  and  the 
sky-scraper,'however  modern  it  may  seem  to  us, 
is  in  reality  a  reversion  to  an  ancient  type  of 
building.  A  similar  spectacle  greets  us  in  all  the 
arts,  especially  in  the  art  of  literature, — the  new 
is  ever  the  old,  even  when  it  presents  itself  with 
all  the  latest  improvements.  Genius  reveals  itself 
when  the  hour  is  ripe;  it  does  its  work  in  its  own 
31 


GATEWAYS  TO  LITERATURE 

fashion;  it  comes  and  it  goes  again,  leaving  us 
the  richer.  There  have  been  many  men  of  many 
minds,  speaking  in  their  several  tongues;  but 
literature  is  one  and  indivisible.  It  has  a  voice 
for  every  mood.  It  cheers  and  sustains;  it  in- 
spires and  uplifts;  it  lights  the  path  for  all  of  us. 
It  passes  the  flaming  torch  from  sire  to  son, 
Greece  to  Rome,  Rome  to  the  Renascence,  the 
Renascence  to  the  modern  world. 

All  passes.     Art  alone 

Enduring  stays  to  us; 
The  Bust  outlasts  the  throne, — 

The  Coin,  Tiberius; 

Even  the  gods  must  go; 

Only  the  lofty  Rime 
Not  countless  years  o'erthrow, — 

Nor  long  array  of  Time. 

(1909.) 


THE  ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION 
OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 


[This  was  delivered  as  the  Presidential  Address  to  the  Modem 
Language  Association  of  America  on   December  28,   1910.} 


II 

THE  ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF 
LITERARY   HISTORY 

IT  is  ten  years  now  since  Professor  Seligman 
publisht  his  acute  and  brilliant  essay  setting 
forth  exactly  what  the  economic  interpretation  of 
history  really  is.  He  made  it  plain  that  "the 
chief  considerations  in  human  progress  are  the 
social  considerations,"  and  that  "the  most  im- 
portant factor  in  social  changes  is  the  economic 
factor."  There  are  other  considerations,  of  course, 
and  there  is  no  warrant  for  the  attempt  to[explain 
all  history  in  economic  terms  alone.  "  The  rise, 
the  progress,  and  the  decay  of  nations  have  been 
largely  due  to  changes  in  economic  relations,  in- 
ternal and  external,  of  the  social  groups,  even 
tho  the  facility  with  which  mankind  has  availed 
itself  of  this  economic  environment  has  been  the 
product  of  intellectual  and  moral  forces.  ...  So 
long  as  the  body  is  not  held  everywhere  in  com- 
plete subjection  to  the  soul,  so  long  as  the  strug- 
gle for  wealth  does  not  everywhere  give  way  to 
the  struggle  for  virtue,  the  social  structure  and 
35 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

the  fundamental  relations  between  social  classes 
will  be  largely  shaped  by  these  overmastering  in- 
fluences, which,  whether  we  approve  or  deplore 
them,  still  form  so  great  a  part  of  the  content  of 
life." 

Underlying  many,  if  not  supporting  most,  of 
the  significant  events  in  human  history  we  can 
find,  if  we  seek  it  diligently,  an  economic  ex- 
planation, even  tho  other  explanations  may  be 
more  apparent  at  first  sight.  A  majority  of  the 
mighty  movements  of  mankind  and  of  the  salient 
struggles  of  the  race,  the  stalwart  efforts  for 
freedom  and  for  expansion,  including  not  a  few 
of  those  which  may  seem  to  be  purely  political, 
or  intellectual,  or  even  religious,  have  also  an 
economic  basis;  they  are  to  be  explained  as  due 
in  part  at  least  to  the  eternal  desire  of  every  hu- 
man being  to  better  himself,  to  heap  up  worldly 
goods,  and  to  secure  himself  against  hunger. 
Attention  has  been  called  to  the  economic  factors 
which  helpt  to  bring  about  the  American  Revo- 
lution and  the  Civil  War,  as  well  as  the  French 
Revolution  and  the  Boer  War,  and  which  can  be 
traced  also  in  the  Spanish  Inquisition,  in  the 
Crusades,  and  even  in  the  expansion  of  Chris- 
tianity. Professor  Gilbert  Murray  has  dwelt  on 
the  advantages  possest  by  Mycenae  and  Troy  as 
trading  sites ;  and  he  has  ventured  to  suggest  an 
economic  explanation  for  the  Greek  expedition 
36 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

against  Priam's  capital.  Perhaps  the  siege  of 
Troy  must  be  ascribed  to  the  unwillingness  of 
the  seafaring  merchants  of  Achaia  to  pay  exorbi- 
tant tolls  to  the  holders  of  the  fastness  which 
commanded  the  most  convenient  route  for  com- 
merce. 

Professor  Seligman  is  clear  in  his  warning  that 
we  must  not  put  too  heavy  a  burden  on  the  theory 
he  has  expounded  so  skilfully  and  so  candidly. 
"The  economic  interpretation  of  history,  correctly 
understood,  does  not  claim  that  every  phenom- 
enon of  human  life  in  general,  or  of  social  life 
in  particular,  is  to  be  explained  on  economic 
grounds.  Few  writers  would  trace  the  different 
manifestations  of  language,  or  even  of  art,  pri- 
marily to  economic  conditions."  And  yet  there 
can  be  no  rich  and  ample  development  of  any  art 
unless  the  economic  conditions  are  favorable. 
These  conditions  may  not  be  the  direct  cause  of 
this  development,  but  if  they  do  not  exist,  it  can- 
not take  place.  A  distinguisht  British  art  critic 
has  asserted  that  the  luxuriance  of  Tudor  archi- 
tecture is  due  directly  to  the  introduction  of  root- 
crops  into  England.  That  is  to  say,  the  turnip 
enabled  the  sheep-farmers  to  carry  their  cattle 
thru  the  winter;  and  as  the  climate  of  the  British 
Isles  favors  sheep-raising,  the  creation  of  a  win- 
ter food-supply  immediately  made  possible  the 
expansion  of  the  wool-trade,  whereby  large  for- 
37 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

tunes  were  soon  accumulated,  the  men  thus  en- 
richt  expending  the  surplus  promptly  in  stately 
and  sumptuous  residences. 

In  political  science  the  search  for  the  funda- 
mental economic  causes  of  important  events  has 
resulted  in  an  enlargement  and  a  reinvigoration  of 
historic  study;  and  there  is  cause  for  surprise 
that  a  method  so  fertile  has  not  been  more  fre- 
quently applied  to  the  history  of  the  several  arts, 
and  more  especially  to  that  of  the  art  of  letters. 
Perhaps  one  reason  for  the  general  neglect  to 
utilize  a  suggestive  method  is  to  be  found  in  the 
fact  that  the  theory  of  the  domination  of  every 
epoch  by  its  great  men,  as  set  forth  strenuously 
by  Carlyle  in  his  '  Heroes  and  Hero-Worship' 
and  now  thoroly  discredited  by  modern  histori- 
cal science,  has  still  an  undeniable  validity  in  the 
several  arts.  It  may  be  that  the  American  Revo- 
lution would  have  run  its  course  successfully  even 
if  Washington  had  never  been  born,  and  that  the 
Civil  War  would  have  ended  as  it  did  even  if 
Lincoln  had  died  at  its  beginning;  but  English 
literature  would  be  very  different  if  there  had 
been  no  Shakspere,  and  French  literature  would 
be  very  different  if  there  had  been  no  Moliere. 
History  may  be  able  to  get  along  without  its  great 
men,  but  literature  lives  by  its  masters  alone. 
It  is  only  what  they  are.  These  mighty  figures 
are  so  salient  and  so  significant,  they  dwarf  the 
38 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

lesser  writers  so  overwhelmingly,  that  most  his- 
tories of  literature  are  content  to  be  only  a  bede- 
roll  of  great  authors. 

This  is  unfortunate,  since  it  gives  us  a  defec- 
tive conception  of  literary  development.  The 
history  of  any  literature  ought  to  be  something 
more  than  a  chronological  collection  of  biographi- 
cal criticisms,  with  only  casual  consideration  of 
the  movements  of  this  literature  as  a  whole.  No 
one  has  yet  written  an  entirely  satisfactory  history 
of  English  literature,  showing  its  successive 
stages  and  the  series  of  influences  which  deter- 
mined its  growth.  With  all  its  defects,  Taine's 
stimulating  book  comes  nearest  to  attaining  this 
ideal, — altho  we  shall  probably  find  it  more  ade- 
quately realized  in  M.  Jusserand's  monumental 
work  when  that  is  at  last  completed.  Indeed, 
we  have  no  handbook  of  English  literature 
worthy  of  comparison  with  M.  Lanson's  school 
text-book  of  French  literature,  in  which  the  bi- 
ographies of  authors  are  relegated  to  footnotes, 
leaving  the  text  free  for  fuller  treatment  of  large 
movements  as  the  literature  of  France  unrolls 
itself  thru  the  ages. 

The  concentration  of  the  historians  of  literature 
upon  biography,  pure  and  simple,  has  led  them 
to  neglect  the  economic  interpretation  and  to  give 
only  casual  consideration  to  the  legal  and  politi- 
cal interpretation.  Indeed,  these  three  aspects 

39 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

are  closely  related;  and  all  three  of  them  demand  a 
more  searching  investigation  than  they  have  yet 
received.  No  historian  of  English  literature  has 
brought  out  the  intimate  connection  which  may 
exist  between  public  lifeand  authorship  as  Gaston 
Boissier  set  it  forth  in  his  illuminating  studies  of 
the  Latin  men  of  letters  in  the  early  days  of  the 
Roman  Empire.  Of  course,  every  chronicler  of 
English  literature  has  been  forced  to  record  the 
result  of  the  closing  of  the  London  theaters  by  the 
Puritans,  just  as  every  chronicler  of  French 
literature  has  had  to  note  the  injurious  restraint 
caused  by  the  selfish  autocracy  of  Louis  XIV  and 
of  Napoleon.  But  there  are  a  host  of  less  obvious 
influences  exerted  from  time  to  time  in  one  liter- 
ature or  another  by  the  political  situation,  by  the 
insufficiency  of  the  legal  protection  afforded  to 
literary  property,  and  by  the  economic  conditions 
of  the  period,  which  have  not  been  thoroly  ana- 
lized  by  the  historians  of  any  modern  literature. 
Perhaps  there  may  be  profit  in  pointing  out  a 
few  of  the  obscurities  which  might  be  cleared  up 
by  the  scholars  who  shall  investigate  these  cog- 
nate influences  upon  literary  expansion.  For  ex- 
ample, it  would  be  instructive  if  some  one  should 
consider  carefully  to  what  extent  the  comparative 
literary  sterility  of  these  United  States  in  the 
middle  years  of  the  nineteenth  century,  when 
we  were  abounding  in  energy,  was  due  to  the 
40 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

absence  of  an  international  copyright  law,  where- 
by our  native  writers  were  exposed  to  an  unfair 
competition  with  the  vendors  of  stolen  goods. 
It  would  be  useful  also  if  some  competent  au- 
thority attempted  to  gage  the  effect  of  a  similar 
legal  deficiency  on  the  English  drama  of  the  same 
period,  and  to  indicate  how  much  of  the  sudden 
expansion  of  the  novel  in  Great  Britain  must  be 
ascribed  to  the  fact  that  it  did  not  pay  to  write 
English  plays  because  the  theatrical  managers 
could  take  French  plays  for  nothing.  And  we 
should  like  to  know  how  much  of  the  abundant 
productivity  of  the  French  drama  during  the  past 
hundred  years  was  due  to  the  secure  position  of 
the  Society  of  Dramatic  Authors,  a  trade-union 
organized  by  Beaumarchais  in  the  eighteenth 
century  and  reorganized  by  Scribe  early  in  the 
nineteenth,  whereby  it  was  made  more  profit- 
able for  a  man  of  letters  in  France  to  compose 
plays  than  to  compose  novels.  There  would  be 
benefit  also  in  an  inquiry  into  the  question 
whether  the  high  literary  quality  of  the  French 
drama  of  this  epoch,  far  higher  than  that  of  the 
drama  in  any  other  language,  was  the  indirect 
result  of  the  support  of  the  Theatre  Francais  by 
the  government  as  a  national  museum  for  dra- 
matic masterpieces. 

"  The  existence  of  man  depends  upon  his  abil- 
ity to  sustain  himself;  the  economic  life  is  there- 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

fore  the  fundamental  condition  of  all  life," — to 
quote  from  Professor  Seligman's  monograph  once 
more.  "To  economic  causes,  therefore,  must 
be  traced,  in  last  instance,  those  transformations 
in  the  structure  of  society,  which  themselves  con- 
dition the  relations  of  social  classes  and  the  man- 
ifestations of  social  life."  Just  as  armies  are  said 
to  advance  on  their  bellies,  since  they  can  never 
get  too  far  ahead  of  the  supply-train,  so  the  arts 
can  flourish  only  as  the  means  of  the  people  may 
permit.  Feuerbach's  famous  phrase,  "Man  is 
what  he  eats,"  does  not  cover  the  whole  truth 
about  life;  yet  an  artist  cannot  create  beauty  un- 
less he  eats.  Food  is  a  condition  precedent  to 
literature.  A  starving  man  is  not  likely  to  set 
himself  down  to  compose  an  epic;  and  a  bard  is 
better  fitted  to  chant  the  high  deeds  of  heroes 
after  the  descendants  of  these  worthies  have  given 
him  bed  and  board.  The  literary  laborer  is  wor- 
thy of  his  hire,  and  without  a  living  wage  he 
cannot  ply  his  trade.  In  the  past  he  has  needed 
a  patron  or  a  pension,  and  in  the  present  he  needs 
popularity  or  private  means.  Martial  once  wrote 
out  a  recipe  for  making  great  poets  :  "Pay  them 
well;  where  there  is  a  Maecenas  there  will  be  a 
Horace  and  a  Vergil  also."  And  Napoleon  voiced 
an  opinion  not  dissimilar  in  a  letter,  written  from 
Berlin  in  1806,  in  which  he  protested  against  the 
feebleness  of  the  lyrics  sung  at  the  Opera  in  honor 
42 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

of  his  victories:  "  Complaints  are  made  that  we 
have  no  literature;  this  is  the  fault  of  the  Minister 
of  the  Interior." 

There  are  four  motives  which  may  inspire  an 
author  to  do  his  best, — the  necessity  for  money, 
the  lust  for  fame,  the  impulse  for  self-expression, 
and  the  desire  to  accomplish  an  immediate  pur- 
pose. Sometimes  they  are  all  combined,  altho 
many  of  the  greatest  writers — Shakspere,  for  one, 
and  Moliere,  for  another — seem  to  have  cared 
little  or  nothing  for  the  good  opinion  of  posterity. 
The  impulse  for  self-expression  and  the  desire  to 
accomplish  an  immediate  purpose  are  both  po- 
tent; but  neither  is  as  insistent  and  as  inexorable 
as  the  necessity  for  money.  In  every  country 
and  in  every  age  men  of  genius  have  been 
tempted  to  adventure  themselves  in  that  form  of 
literature  which  happened  then  and  there  to  be 
most  popular  and  therefore  most  likely  to  be 
profitable.  This  is  what  accounts  for  the  rich- 
ness of  the  drama  in  England  under  Queen  Eliza- 
beth, for  the  vogue  of  the  essay  under  Quaen 
Anne,  and  for  the  immense  expansion  of  the 
novel  under  Queen  Victoria. 

Dr.  Johnson  went  so  far  as  to  assert  that  a  man 
was  a  fool  who  wrote  from  any  other  motive 
than  the  need  of  money.  This  is  a  characteristi- 
cally false  utterance,  and  it  is  discredited  by  the 
significant  fact  that  the  piece  of  Johnson's  own 

43 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

prose  which  has  the  most  savor  is  his  letter  to 
Chesterfield,  for  which  he  was  not  paid  and  in 
which  he  was  expressing  himself  without  ex- 
pectation of  profit.  Yet  this  saying  of  his 
may  suggest  a  reason  for  the  neglect  which 
has  befallen  nearly  all  of  Johnson's  work.  He 
wrote  for  pay;  and  he  could  not  expect  posterity 
to  take  pleasure  in  perusing  what  he  had  not 
taken  pleasure  in  composing. 

That  the  need  for  money  has  not  always  been 
the  overmastering  motive  is  made  evident  by  the 
long  list  of  authors,  ancient  and  modern,  who 
were  not  men  of  letters  by  profession,  whose 
writings  are  by-products  of  their  other  activities, 
who  composed  without  any  thought  of  pay,  and 
who  took  pen  in  hand  to  accomplish  an  imme- 
diate purpose.  Franklin  never  wrote  for  money 
and  he  never  publisht  a  book;  his  works  consist 
only  of  occasional  pamphlets;  and  probably  noth- 
ing would  more  surprise  him  today  than  the  fact 
that  he  now  holds  an  honored  place  as  a  man  of 
letters.  Voltaire  was  a  shrewd  money-maker, 
a  singularly  adroit  man  of  affairs;  and  only  a 
small  proportion  of  his  large  fortune  was  earned 
by  his  pen. 

As  M.  Beljame  has  stated  the  case  in  his  ad- 
mirable discussion  of  the  relations  between  the 
public  and  the  men  of  letters  in  England  in  the 
44 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

eighteenth  century,  "so  long  as  education  is  the 
privilege  of  a  chosen  few,  so  long  as  the  taste  for 
and  the  habit  of  reading  are  not  spread  abroad  in 
a  fair  proportion  of  society,  it  is  clear  that  writ- 
ers can  find  in  the  sales  of  their  works  only  an 
uncertain  and  insufficient  resource."  Literature 
as  a  profession,  as  a  calling  which  shall  support 
its  man,  is  possible  only  after  the  earlier  aristo- 
cratic organization  has  broadened  into  a  more 
democratic  condition,  and  after  the  appreciation 
of  letters  has  ceased  to  be  the  privilege  only  of 
the  few.  So  long  as  the  narrower  aristocratic 
organization  endures,  the  man  of  letters  cannot 
rely  on  his  pen  for  support.  He  needs  a  Mae- 
cenas; he  sues  for  pensions;  he  hucksters  his 
dedications.  He  may  believe  that  poetry  is  his 
vocation,  but  he  feels  in  need  of  an  avocation  to 
keep  a  roof  over  his  head. 

So  it  is  that  until  the  growth  of  a  middle  class 
and  the  extension  of  education  combine  to  make 
the  structure  of  society  more  democratic,  and  to 
supply  at  last  a  reading  public  large  enough  to 
reward  the  author's  labor,  literature  can  be  little 
more  than  the  accompaniment  of  its  creator's 
other  activities.  Shakspere  and  Molidre  were 
actors;  Fielding  was  a  police  magistrate  and 
Scott  was  a  sheriff;  Burns  was  a  gager  and 
Wordsworth  a  stamp-distributer;  Hav/thorne 
had  places  in  the  revenue  and  consular  services; 

45 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

Longfellow  and  Lowell  were  college  professors. 
And  it  is  scarcely  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  in 
the  mid-years  of  the  nineteenth  century  a  large 
proportion  of  the  New  England  writers  were  able 
to  support  themselves  only  because  they  were 
competent  also  to  practise  the  allied  art  of  the 
lecturer.  The  lyceum-system,  as  it  was  called, 
was  long  the  mainstay  of  American  literature. 
One  man  of  letters  used  to  declare  that  he  lec- 
tured for  fame,— F-A-M-E,— Fifty  And  My  Ex- 
penses. 

Only  by  his  annual  vagrancy  as  a  lecturer  was 
the  frugal  Emerson  able  to  bring  up  his  family. 
He  was  not  blind  to  the  inconveniences  of  the 
procedure,  and  in  his  journal  he  recorded  that  it 
seemed  to  him  "tantamount  to  this:  'I  '11  bet 
you  fifty  dollars  a  day  for  three  weeks  that  you 
will  not  leave  your  library,  and  wade,  and  freeze, 
and  ride,  and  run,  and  suffer  all  manner  of  indig- 
nities, and  stand  up  for  an  hour  each  night  read- 
ing in  a  hall; '  and  I  answer,  '  I  '11  bet  I  will.'  1 
do  it  and  win  the  nine  hundred  dollars."  And 
yet  whatever  its  inconveniences  and  its  indigni- 
ties, the  lyceum-system  markt  an  economic  ad- 
vance; it  made  possible  an  appeal  to  the  public 
as  a  whole.  And  as  it  enabled  the  lecturer  to 
rely  on  his  fellow-citizens,  so  it  forced  him  to  rub 
shoulders  with  them  and  to  widen  his  own  out- 
look on  life;  it  was  fundamentally  anti-aristocratic. 
46 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

The  lyceum-system  in  America  provided  the 
economic  possibility  which  permitted  Emerson 
to  support  himself  without  sacrifice  of  character. 
The  lack  of  an  equivalent  economic  possibility  in 
England  is  responsible  for  the  pitiful  waste  of 
the  large  genius  of  Dryden.  M.  Beljame  has 
made  it  clear  that  under  the  Restoration  there 
was  really  no  public  for  an  author  to  rely  on. 
There  was  the  corrupt  court;  there  was  a  petty 
cotery  of  self-styled  wits ;  and  that  was  all.  For 
books  there  was  little  or  no  sale,  altho  there  were 
casual  profits  from  fulsome  dedications  to  noble 
patrons.  As  a  result  there  is  little  vitality  in  the 
literature  of  the  Restoration,  little  validity.  And 
Dryden,  a  man  of  noble  endowment,  had  to  make 
a  living  by  composing  broad  comedies  to  tickle 
the  jaded  courtiers, — a  form  of  literature  for 
which,  as  he  confest  frankly,  he  was  not  natu- 
rally gifted. 

Dryden  was  born  out  of  time,  either  too  late 
or  too  early.  His  work  would  have  been  larger 
and  richer  had  he  been  a  younger  contemporary 
of  Shakspere,  expressing  himself  in  the  full 
tragic  form  which  Shakspere  transmitted  to  those 
who  followed  him.  It  would  have  been  more 
spontaneous  had  he  been  a  contemporary  of  Pope 
or  of  Scott  or  of  Tennyson.  Even  in  Pope's  time, 
separated  from  Dryden's  by  so  brief  a  span,  there 
had  come  into  existence  a  reading  public  to  which 

47 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

a  poet  could  appeal.  In  the  preface  to  the  '  Dun- 
ciad,'  Pope  prided  himself  on  the  fact  that  he  had 
never  held  office  or  received  a  pension  or  any 
gift  from  queen  or  minister. 

But  (thanks  to  Homer)  since  I  live  and  thrive, 
Indebted  to  no  Prince  or  Peer  alive. 

And  having  gained  nine  thousand  pounds  by 
his  translation,  he  felt  independent  enough  to 
dedicate  the  long-expected  book,  not  to  any  no- 
ble patron  who  would  pay  liberally  for  the  honor, 
but  to  his  fellow-author,  Congreve. 

In  the  century  that  intervened  between  Pope 
and  Byron,  the  reading  public  kept  on  expand- 
ing and  the  publishing  trade  establisht  itself  sol- 
idly. The  economic  conditions  of  authorship 
were  thereby  immeasurably  improved;  and  it 
would  be  interesting  to  speculate  on  the  enrich- 
ment of  English  poetry  by  the  natural  outflower- 
ing  of  Dryden's  genius  which  might  have  taken 
place  if  the  author  of  '  Absalom  and  Achitophel ' 
had  been  born  a  contemporary  of  the  author  of 
'English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers.'  Scott 
at  the  same  time,  and  Tennyson  a  half-century 
later,  won  large  rewards  by  a  direct  appeal  to 
the  broadening  body  of  readers;  and  yet  who 
would  be  so  bold  as  to  suggest  that  Dryden  was 
inferior  to  either  of  these  popular  poets  in  mas- 
culine vigor  or  in  intellectual  power? 
48 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

In  Dryden's  day  literature  had  not  yet  become 
a  profession,  since  a  profession  cannot  be  said  to 
exist  until  it  can  support  its  professionals.  In- 
deed, the  final  difference  between  the  profes- 
sional and  the  amateur  is  that  the  latter  is  willing 
to  work  for  nothing,  whereas  the  former  demands 
his  day's  wages.  Bayes,  the  hero  of  the  '  Re- 
hearsal' (in  which  Dry  den  was  satirized),  revealed 
himself  as  an  amateur  when  he  cried,  "For  what 
care  I  for  money?  I  write  for  Fame  and  Repu- 
tation." And  Byron  stood  forth  a  professional 
when  he  persisted  in  raising  his  rate  of  payment 
at  the  very  time  when  he  was  insisting  on  Mur- 
ray's treating  him  as  a  nobleman.  The  profes- 
sional man  of  letters  may  be  known  by  his  respect 
for  a  check  on  the  bank, — for  what  Lowell  aptly 
described  as  "that  species  of  literature  which  has 
the  supreme  art  of  conveying  the  most  pleasure 
in  the  least  space." 

Altho  the  unfortunate  economic  condition  of 
literature  in  his  day  especially  affected  Dryden, 
who  felt  himself  forced  to  compose  comedies  of 
a  doubtful  decency,  the  author  of  'All  for  Love' 
is  far  from  being  alone  in  this  lack  of  adjustment 
between  the  work  for  which  he  was  intended  by 
native  gift  and  the  task  to  which  he  turned  per- 
force to  earn  his  living.  As  Dryden  wrote  com- 
edies against  the  grain,  so  in  their  days  Marlowe 
and  Peele  wrote  plays  of  a  more  primitive  type, 

49 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

altho  neither  of  them  had  the  instinctive  faculty 
of  the  born  playwright.  Marlowe,  of  the  mighty 
line,  was  essentially  an  epic  poet,  and  it  is  by 
main  strength  that  he  built  his  cumbrous  pieces. 
Peele  was  essentially  a  lyric  poet,  feeling  feebly 
after  a  dramatic  formula  which  was  ever  eluding 
his  grasp.  Both  Marlowe  and  Peele  were  turned 
aside  from  the  true  expression  of  their  genius  by 
the  ready  pay  of  the  playhouse,  which  then  gave 
better  wages  than  could  elsewhere  be  had. 

Later  examples  are  abundant  and  significant. 
For  instance,  Steele  and  Addison  elaborated  the 
delightful  eighteenth-century  essay,  with  its  easy 
briskness  and  its  playful  social  satire;  and  Gold- 
smith, in  his  turn,  found  the  form  ready  to  his 
hand  and  exactly  suited  to  his  special  gift.  But 
because  this  airy  and  graceful  essay  had  an  en- 
during popularity  and  because  it  brought  in  a 
prompt  reward  in  cash,  it  was  attempted  by  the 
ponderous  Dr.  Johnson,  who  had  not  the  natural 
lightness,  the  intangible  charm,  and  the  allusive 
felicity  which  the  essay  demanded. 

In  the  nineteenth  century  the  vogue  of  the 
essay  was  succeeded  by  the  vogue  of  the  novel, 
which  was  tempting  to  not  a  few  as  little  fitted 
for  it  as  Johnson  was  for  the  brisk  essay.  Brough- 
am and  Motley  and  Froude  severally  made  ship- 
wreck in  fiction.  Perhaps  it  is  not  fanciful  to 
suggest  that  it  was  the  desire  for  the  pecuniary 
50 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

reward  that  fiction  then  proffered  abundantly 
which  lured  George  Eliot  into  novel-writing 
rather  than  any  native  impulse  to  story-telling. 
Her  labored  narratives,  rich  as  they  are  in  insight 
into  humanity,  lack  spontaneity;  they  are  the  re- 
sult of  her  intelligence  primarily;  they  are  built 
by  obvious  effort.  If  the  economic  conditions  of 
literature  in  the  nineteenth  century  had  been 
different,  it  is  unlikely  that  Mary  Ann  Evans 
would  ever  have  attempted  fiction.  And  Charles 
Reade,  who  liked  to  think  of  himself  as  a  more 
original  novelist  than  George  Eliot,  used  to  assert 
that  he  had  been  intended  by  nature  for  a  drama- 
tist, and  that  he  had  been  forced  into  fiction  by  bad 
laws.  Quite  possibly  Augier  and  the  younger 
Dumas,  had  they  written  in  English,  might  have 
felt  the  same  legal  oppression  coercing  them  to 
give  up  the  drama  for  prose-fiction. 

Novels  may  be  written  for  money,  but  history 
must  be  a  labor  of  love.  Now  and  again,  most 
unexpectedly,  a  historical  work  happens  to  hit 
the  public  fancy  and  to  bring  to  its  surprised 
author  an  unexpected  reward  for  his  toil.  But 
this  is  only  a  happy  accident,  most  infrequent; 
and  the  historian  can  count  himself  fortunate  if 
he  has  not  to  pay  out  of  his  own  pocket  for  the 
publication  of  his  work.  As  Ri varol  said,  ' '  There 
are  virtues  that  one  can  practise  only  when  one 
is  rich;"  and  the  writing  of  history  is  one  of 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

these  virtues.  Macaulay  toiled  long  in  India  that 
he  might  accumulate  the  modest  fortune  which 
would  give  him  leisure  to  undertake  the  re- 
searches that  were  to  sustain  his  historical  work. 
Gibbon  and  Prescott  and  Parkman  were  lucky 
in  inheriting  the  sufficient  estates  which  enabled 
them  to  live  laborious  days  without  taking 
thought  of  the  morrow.  Indeed,  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  here  is  one  of  the  best  defenses  of 
inherited  wealth — that  in  every  generation  a  few 
pickt  men  are  set  free  for  unremunerative  investi- 
gations, not  otherwise  likely  to  be  undertaken. 
While  history  is  thus  seen  to  be  more  or  less 
dependent  on  economic  conditions,  its  close  ally, 
oratory,  is  dependent  rather  upon  political  con- 
ditions. In  the  last  analysis,  oratory  is  the  art  of 
persuasion;  it  is  lifeless  and  juiceless  when  the 
speaker  has  not  set  his  heart  upon  influencing 
those  he  is  addressing;  and  therefore  it  is  impos- 
sible where  there  is  no  free  speech.  In  fact,  it  can 
flourish  only  in  a  free  people,  and  it  stiffens  into 
academic  emptiness  whenever  the  citizen  is 
muzzled.  It  ceased  in  Greece  as  soon  as  the 
tyrants  substituted  their  rule  for  the  large  freedom 
of  the  commonwealth ;  and  it  froze  into  formality 
in  Rome  as  soon  as  the  Empire  was  erected  on  the 
ruins  of  the  Republic.  It  developt  healthily  in 
Great  Britain  and  in  the  United  States  as  the 
people  came  to  take  political  power  into  their 
52 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

own  hands.  In  France,  under  the  monarchy,  it 
could  flourish  only  in  the  pulpit,  within  the  nar- 
row limitations  of  the  Lenten  sermon  and  of  the 
funeral  discourse;  and  as  a  result  the  orators  of 
the  Revolution,  after  they  had  achieved  the  right 
to  speak  out,  had  no  models  to  keep  them  from 
artificiality  and  from  pedantry;  they  lackt  the  ex- 
perience of  actual  debate  which  trains  for  direct- 
ness and  for  sincerity. 

Just  as  the  full  development  of  oratory  is  de- 
pendent upon  political  conditions,  so  the  ample 
expansion  of  the  drama  is  dependent  on  social 
conditions.  When  Longfellow  declared  that  the 
country  is  lyric  and  the  town  dramatic  he  had  in 
mind  probably  the  fact  that  the  lyric  poet  deals 
with  nature,  whereas  the  dramatic  poet  deals 
with  human  nature.  The  lyric  poet  may  live  in 
rural  solitude,  chanting  his  own  emotions  at  his 
own  sweet  will.  The  dramatic  poet  has  to 
dwell  with  the  throng,  that  he  may  gain  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  varied  types  of  humanity  he 
needs  to  people  his  plays.  But  he  is  compelled 
to  the  city  by  another  fact, — the  inexorable  fact 
that  only  where  men  are  massed  together  can  the 
frequent  audiences  be  found  which  alone  can  sup- 
port the  theater.  The  drama  is  a  function  of  the 
crowd;  and  it  is  impossible  in  a  village  com- 
munity where  the  inhabitants  are  scattered  over 
the  distant  hillsides.  It  can  flourish  only  in  the 
53 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

densely  populated  cities,  where  all  sorts  and  con- 
ditions of  men  are  packt  together,  restless  and 
energetic.  No  dramatist  ever  had  a  chance  to 
develop  except  in  an  urban  community  where  the 
actual  theater  provided  him  with  the  means  of 
practising  his  art.  If  any  man  born  with  the  in- 
stinctive faculty  of  playmaking,  the  essential  dra- 
maturgic quality,  had  ever  chanced  to  grow  to 
maturity  in  a  purely  rural  environment,  he  must 
have  been  driven  forth  to  a  city,  or  else  from 
sheer  lack  of  opportunity  he  must  have  failed  to 
accomplish  what  he  vaguely  desired.  In  the  re- 
mote village  a  "mute,  inglorious  Milton"  might 
perchance  develop  into  an  "enamored  architect 
of  airy  rime  " ;  but  a  Shakspere  would  be  doomed 
to  remain  mute  and  inglorious. 

The  drama,  being  dependent  on  the  mass  of 
men,  being  a  function  of  the  crowd,  has  never 
been  aristocratic,  as  certain  of  the  other  forms  of 
literary  art  may  have  been  now  and  again.  In- 
deed, the  drama  is  the  only  art  which  is  inherently 
and  inevitably  democratic,  since  the  playwright 
cannot  depend  upon  a  cotery  of  the  cultivated 
only  or  on  a  clique  of  dilettants.  It  is  the  play- 
wright's duty,  as  it  is  his  pleasure  also,  to  move 
men  in  the  mass,  to  appeal  to  them  as  fellow 
human  beings  only,  to  strive  to  ascertain  the 
greatest  common  denominator  of  the  throng. 
To  say  this  is  to  suggest  that  the  drama  is  likely 
54 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

to  gain  steadily  in  power,  now  that  the  chief  na- 
tions of  the  modern  world  are  organized  at  last 
upon  a  democratic  basis.  And  the  prediction 
may  be  ventured  also  that  if  the  rising  tide  of 
socialism  ever  succeeds  in  overwhelming  democ- 
racy and  in  substituting  collective  effort  for  per- 
sonal endeavor,  the  drama  will  be  the  first  art  to 
suffer,  since  it  exists  primarily  to  set  forth  the 
clash  of  contending  desires  and  the  struggle  of 
individual  wills. 

Literature  cannot  help  being  more  or  less  aristo- 
cratic in  its  tone  when  the  man  of  letters  must 
look  for  his  living  to  pensions  from  the  monarch 
or  to  largess  from  a  wealthy  patron.  Literature 
becomes  democratic  inevitably  when  the  man  of 
letters  is  released  from  this  servitude  to  a  social 
superior  and  when  he  finds  himself  free  to  appeal 
for  support  to  the  public  as  a  whole.  Economic 
and  political  and  legal  conditions  need  to  be  taken 
into  account  by  all  historians  of  literature,  ancient 
and  modern.  "While  his  appearance  at  a  par- 
ticular moment  appears  to  us  a  matter  of  chance, 
the  great  man  influences  society  only  when  so- 
ciety is  ready  for  him."  So  Professor  Seligman 
has  asserted,  adding  the  apt  comment  that  "if 
society  is  not  ready  for  him,  he  is  called  not  a 
great  man,  but  a  visionary  or  a  failure." 

He  who  possesses  the  potentiality  of  becom- 
ing one  of  the  great  men  of  literature  may  be 

55 


ECONOMIC  INTERPRETATION  OF  LITERARY  HISTORY 

born  out  of  time  or  he  may  be  born  out  of  place. 
For  the  full  expansion  of  his  genius  he  needs  the 
fit  moment  and  the  fit  environment;  and  with- 
out the  one  or  the  other  he  may  be  crusht  and 
maimed.  And  yet  if  he  has  the  ample  large- 
ness of  true  genius,  he  is  likely  to  have  also  the 
shrewd  common  sense  of  the  man  of  affairs. 
He  will  have  the  gift  of  making  the  best  of  things 
as  they  chance  to  be,  without  whining  and  with- 
out revolt.  He  will  rise  superior  to  circum- 
stances, either  because  he  is  supple  enough  to 
adapt  himself  to  them,  or  because  he  is  strong 
enough  to  conquer  them,  turning  into  a  step- 
ping-stone the  obstacle  which  weaker  creatures 
would  find  only  a  stumbling-block. 
(1910.) 


IN  BEHALF  OF 
THE  GENERAL  READER 


Ill 

IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

TORD  CHESTERFIELD  once  warned  his  son 
.L/  against  "the  communicative  and  shining  pe- 
dants who  adorn  their  conversation,  even  with 
women,  byhappy  quotations  of  Greek  and  Latin." 
And  he  added  the  excellent  advice  to  shun  empty 
display:  "If  you  would  avoid  the  accusation  of 
pedantry  on  the  one  hand,  or  the  suspicion  of 
ignorance  on  the  other,  abstain  from  learned  os- 
tentation. Speak  the  language  of  the  company 
you  are  in;  speak  it  purely,  and  unlarded  with 
any  other." 

It  is  a  pity  that  Chesterfield's  suggestion  to  his 
son  has  not  produced  more  impression  upon  cer- 
tain of  the  writers  of  our  time.  There  is  one 
prolific  British  author  who  might  be  cited  as  a 
horrible  example,  since  his  pages  are  a  ragbag 
of  allusions  and  quotations  in  any  and  every  lan- 
guage. The  assumption  of  this  writer  seems  to 
be  that  all  the  readers  of  any  of  his  works  are  as 
familiar  with  these  languages  as  he  is  himself, 

59 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

and  that  they  will  recognize  the  most  recondite 
allusions  collected  during  his  own  multifarious 
reading.  This  is  most  intolerable  and  not  to  be 
endured;  it  is  nothing  less  than  the  superfluity 
of  naughtiness.  It  is  akin  to  the  arrogant  inso- 
lence of  the  bishop  who  quoted  Hebrew  in  a 
sermon  to  a  remote  and  rustic  congregation,  and 
who  justified  himself  with  the  airy  explanation 
that  "everybody  knows  a  little  Hebrew." 

Now,  everybody  does  not  know  a  little  He- 
brew. Everybody  does  not  know  even  a  little 
French  or  German.  Not  every  one  of  us  has 
had  even  a  little  Latin,  to  linger  indistinct  and 
doubtful  in  the  recesses  of  his  memory.  And 
those  who  happen  to  have  Hebrew  and  Latin 
may  not  have  any  French  or  German,  just  as 
those  who  are  on  speaking  terms  with  these 
modern  tongues  may  never  have  been  introduced 
to  the  ancient  languages.  No  author  has  any 
right  to  assume  that  any  reader  is  possest  of  pre- 
cisely his  own  equipment;  and  at  bottom  such 
an  assumption  is  simply  impertinent.  And  there- 
fore every  author  would  do  well  to  ponder  Ches- 
terfield's command  to  "speak  the  language  of 
the  company  you  are  in;  speak  it  purely,  and  un- 
larded  with  any  other."  More  than  eight  centu- 
ries ago,  Giraldus  Cambrensis  askt, — "Is  it  not 
better  to  be  dumb  than  to  speak  so  as  not  to  be 
understood?" 

60 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

The  presumption  that  an  author  is  at  liberty  to 
do  as  he  pleases  in  his  own  book  is  contrary  to 
the  fundamental  and  eternal  principle  that  books 
are  written  for  the  benefit  of  the  readers, — or  at 
least  that  books  are  publisht  for  the  benefit  of 
the  readers.  The  author,  after  having  composed 
his  work  for  his  own  delight,  to  express  himself, 
is  under  no  compulsion  to  give  it  to  the  world. 
He  is  justified  in  so  doing  only  if  he  conceives 
that  his  writing  has  a  purpose  to  accomplish, — 
that  is,  if  he  believes  that  it  will  bestow  either 
pleasure  or  profit  upon  those  who  may  peruse  it. 
If  he  refuses  to  consider  his  readers,  then  the 
publication  of  his  book  is  for  the  sake  of  the 
writer  himself,  not  of  these  readers.  It  becomes 
an  exhibition  of  essential  selfishness,  mere  vanity 
and  vexation  of  spirit.  A  book  ought  to  be  rich 
with  the  full  flavor  of  the  author's  personality; 
primarily  it  ought  to  express  him,  but  seconda- 
rily it  is  for  the  sole  benefit  of  the  reader.  It  is 
a  pretty  poor  book  that  brings  joy  chiefly  to  its 
author. 

A  book  which  is  worth  while  is  a  special  mes- 
sage from  its  writer  to  the  readers;  and  the  re- 
ception of  the  message  is,  and  must  be,  in  pro- 
portion to  the  skill  with  which  this  message  has 
been  phrased  to  appeal  to  all  who  are  willing  to 
hear  it.  To  say  this  is  not  to  suggest  that  the 
author  must  write  down  to  the  level  of  "the  man 
61 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

in  the  street";  and  yet  many  of  the  masterpieces 
of  literature — Defoe's  '  Robinson  Crusoe,'  for  ex- 
ample, and  Bunyan's  '  Pilgrim's  Progress,'  Whit- 
man's '  O  Captain,  my  Captain '  and  Kipling's 
'Recessional,'  Voltaire's  'Charles  XII'  and  Lin- 
coln's 'Gettysburg  Address' — are  not  elevated 
above  the  easy  comprehension  of  those  whose 
educational  opportunities  have  been  but  scant. 
The  author  need  not  "write  down,"  but  he 
ought  to  "write  broad," — if  the  term  may  be 
ventured.  He  ought  to  be  possest  of  a  sympa- 
thetic understanding  of  the  state  of  his  readers' 
minds,  of  their  previous  knowledge  of  the  sub- 
ject, of  their  opinions,  and  even  of  their  preju- 
dices. He  may  choose  the  class  of  readers  whom 
he  wishes  to  reach;  and  then  he  must  ever  keep 
in  mind  the  capabilities  and  the  limitations  of  all 
the  members  of  this  group. 

It  is  the  good  fortune  of  the  drama  that  it  is 
the  most  democratic  of  the  arts,  since  it  must 
direct  itself  to  the  people  as  a  whole.  Yet  this 
appeal  to  the  multitude  has  never  debased  the 
drama.  'Hamlet'  and  'Tartuffe'  are  most  pop- 
ular plays;  and  they  are  also  masterpieces  of 
dramatic  art.  Shakspere  and  Moliere  did  not 
condescend  to  the  public;  they  gave  that  public 
the  best  they  had  in  them,  but  with  the  utmost 
care  to  give  it  also  what  they  knew  it  relisht.  Of 
course,  very  few  pieces  have  ever  had  the  breadtb 
62 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

of  appeal  of  'Hamlet'  and  'Tartuffe'  ;  and  the 
modern  dramatist,  when  he  is  building  his  play, 
is  likely  to  have  in  mind  some  subdivision  of  the 
throng, — either  the  larger  segment  that  craves 
the  fierce  joys  of  melodrama  or  the  smaller  cross- 
section  that  is  ever  eager  to  discuss  the  problem- 
play. 

It  is  a  choice  of  this  sort  that  the  writer  of 
books  is  bound  to  make  before  he  starts  in  on  his 
work, — and  especially  the  writer  of  history,  of 
biography,  and  of  criticism.  Is  he  going  to  write 
for  the  general  reader,  for  the  average  man  and 
woman  of  average  intelligence  and  of  average 
education?  Or  is  he  resolved  to  limit  the  circu- 
lation of  his  work  to  the  tiny  knot  of  his  fellow- 
specialists?  In  other  words,  shall  he  follow  the 
example  of  the  French  or  the  example  of  the  Ger- 
mans? Shall  he  make  his  book  readable  by  all, 
as  the  French  try  to  do?  Or  shall  he  be  satisfied 
to  have  it  hopelessly  unreadable,  except  by  a  re- 
stricted circle  of  like-minded  students,  as  the 
Germans  very  often  prefer  to  do.  It  is  true,  of 
course,  that  there  are  French  books  which  are 
hopelessly  unreadable,  and  it  is  sad  to  see  that 
their  number  has  been  increasing  of  late.  It  is 
equally  true  that  there  are  also  German  books 
which  are  as  readable  as  the  best  of  the  French. 
Yet  the  distinction  holds  good  in  the  main;  and 
there  is  no  denying  that  the  German  is  inclined 
63 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

to  address  himself  mainly  to  his  fellow-scholars, 
whereas  the  Frenchman  deliberately  devotes  him- 
self to  the  task  of  interesting  the  general  reader. 
The  Germans  insist  on  scientific  thoroness,  and 
they  are  willing  to  pay  a  heavy  price  for  it.  The 
French  are  governed  by  the  social  instinct  which 
urges  them  to  endeavor  to  please  and  to  attract. 
"Your  scientific  critic  is  usually  a  wearisome 
creature,"  said  John  Burroughs;  and  the  Teutonic 
investigator  is  often  pitiless  in  his  stern  resolu- 
tion to  approve  himself  a  scientific  critic.  The 
French  view  is  scarcely  overstated  in  an  early 
letter  of  Taine's  in  which  he  dared  the  assertion 
that  "at  bottom,  books  are  not  books  unless  they 
are  amusing;  the  others  are  only  library  furni- 
ture." There  are  works  of  immense  learning  and 
of  immediate  utility  which  are  like  library  furni- 
ture in  that  they  are  certain  sooner  or  later  to  be 
outworn. 

Where  the  German  toils  like  a  man  of  the 
cloister,  a  secluded  Benedictine,  aiming  to  be  ap- 
preciated only  by  those  whose  training  has  been 
as  arduous  as  his  own,  disdainful  of  the  plaudits 
of  the  vulgar,  and  almost  suspicious  of  any  out- 
side popularity,  the  Frenchman  remains  a  man 
of  the  world,  interested  in  life  as  much  as  in 
literature,  not  neglectful  of  the  latest  accretions 
of  knowledge,  but  holding  these  to  be  valuable 
only  as  they  can  be  coordinated  into  a  more 
64 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

comprehensive  consideration  of  the  subject  in  its 
larger  relations.  Where  the  German  scholar  is 
likely  to  be  solitary,  the  French  scholar  is  social 
and  sociable.  Gaston  Boissier,  who  combined 
Teutonic  thoroness  with  Gallic  clarity  and  charm, 
once  declared  the  principles  which  underlie  French 
literature  and  which  explain  its  universality.  The 
French  author  is  rarely  a  solitary  dreamer,  so 
Boissier  tells  us;  "like  the  orator,  he  seeks  to 
convince  and  to  persuade.  He  addresses  himself 
to  the  public.  He  takes  pains  to  be  clear  so  that 
he  may  be  understood,  whatever  the  subject  he 
may  be  treating.  He  arranges  his  matter  care- 
fully; he  develops  his  ideas  into  generalities;  he 
wants  to  be  comprehended  by  all." 

It  is  partly  because  this  has  been  the  ideal  of 
the  French  man  of  letters  that  French  literature 
has  won  its  way  all  over  the  world,  and  that 
French  is  still  the  second  language  of  every  edu- 
cated man,  whatever  his  native  speech.  French 
literature  has  the  element  of  universality;  in- 
tensely national  as  it  may  be,  it  is  not  narrowly 
local;  it  appeals  to  humanity  at  large.  One  of 
my  colleags  at  Columbia  has  told  me  that  he 
once  heard  a  professor  in  a  German  university 
advise  his  students  to  buy  the  French  translation 
of  his  own  monumental  work  rather  than  the 
German  original, — because  the  French  version 
was  clearer  and  therefore  more  easily  read. 

65 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

Transparent  clarity  is  the  dominant  characteristic 
of  French  literature.  This  may  account  in  part 
for  the  inadequacy  of  French  poetry;  but  it  is  an 
inestimable  profit  for  French  prose.  A  French 
book  is  widely  read  in  its  own  language  outside 
the  borders  of  France;  and  it  lends  itself  easily 
to  translation  into  a  host  of  strange  tongues. 

To  Germany  we  have  to  go  for  the  army  of 
books  which  extend  the  confines  of  know- 
ledge; and  yet  not  a  few  German  books  almost 
force  us  to  conquer  that  knowledge  for  our- 
selves. The  facts  we  are  seeking  are  contained 
in  the  works  of  the  German  author,  or  they  are 
concealed  there,  entangled  with  a  heterogeny  of 
other  facts,  which  cumber  the  pathway  to  our 
goal.  Sometimes  we  are  almost  stunned  by  the 
noise  of  the  apparatus  which  intimidates  us  from 
the  approach  to  the  essential  product.  The  facts 
are  there  somewhere,  if  we  can  only  find  them, 
and  the  ideas,  also,  which  interpret  those  facts  ; 
but  these  are  likely  to  be  inextricably  com- 
mingled with  other  facts  and  other  ideas,  with 
endless  quotations  and  endless  citations  and 
endless  references. 

As  a  result  we  cannot  help  regretting  that  Dr. 
Holmes  did  not  carry  out  a  humorous  sugges- 
tion he  once  let  fall:  "I  sometimes  feel  as  if  I 
should  like  to  found  a  chair  to  teach  the  igno- 
rance of  what  people  do  not  want  to  know." 
66 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

Here  in  the  United  States,  of  late  years,  many 
of  our  historians  and  biographers  and  not  a  few 
of  our  literary  historians  have  gone  to  school  to 
the  Germans,  to  their  abiding  profit.  They  have 
learnt  the  needed  lesson  of  scientific  solidity  of 
knowledge.  Unfortunately,  some  of  them  have 
also  imbibed  from  their  Teutonic  teachers  not 
only  a  taste  for  absolute  precision  of  information, 
but  also  a  relish  for  insisting  upon  the  results  of 
their  praiseworthy  industry.  They  set  forth  the 
minutest  details  of  their  investigations.  Intheirre- 
coil  from  the  quagmire  of ' '  belles-lettristic  trifling" 
they  fall  into  the  abyss  of  pedantry.  They  are 
making  books  which  are  not  only  unreadable  by 
the  average  reader,  but  which  are  frankly  not  in- 
tended to  be  read  by  anybody  except  by  a  very 
limited  circle  of  fellow-specialists.  They  dis- 
cuss the  least  important  technical  details  and 
indulge  in  interminable  controversy  over  minor 
questions.  They  assume  in  every  reader  an  ac- 
quaintance with  the  preceding  stages  of  the  dis- 
cussion. Such  books  are  contributions  rather  to 
science  than  to  literature;  they  are  honorable 
and  necessary;  they  are  the  outward  and  visi- 
ble signs  of  exact  scholarship.  But  obviously 
their  appeal  is,  and  must  be,  limited  to  the  small 
group  of  investigators  to  which  their  own  au- 
thors severally  belong.  And  there  is  always  a 
danger  that  these  tireless  students  may  be  tempt- 
67 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

ed  in  time  to  accept  their  work  as  an  end  in 
itself,  and  not  merely  as  a  means  toward  a  wider 
wisdom.  They  may  be  willing  to  echo  the  re- 
cent remark  of  an  American  professor  of  history 
who  declared  that  a  certain  publication  was  his 
ideal  of  what  a  book  ought  to  be,  because  its 
pages  contained  but  two  or  three  lines  of  text  at 
the  top,  the  remaining  space  being  surrendered 
to  foot-notes,  stuft  with  references  and  citations. 
Plainly  enough,  the  author  of  any  book  built 
upon  this  plan  must  have  renounced  in  advance 
all  hope  of  attracting  any  readers  other  than 
those  who  were  as  strictly  scientific  as  he  was 
himself.  His  book  is  not  a  book,  it  is  only 
library  furniture,  to  be  utilized  on  occasion, 
but  never  to  be  enjoyed.  It  may  have  the  scien- 
tific virtues,  but  it  is  devoid  of  artistic  attributes. 
Its  defects  are  intentional,  no  doubt,  but  they 
are  none  the  less  deplorable.  They  are  due  to  a 
mistaken  standard, — or  at  least  to  the  adoption 
of  a  standard  which  the  greatest  historians  have 
rejected.  Gibbon,  for  example,  built  a  monu- 
ment more  enduring  than  brass;  and  for  nearly 
a  century  and  a  half  his  massive  work  has  with- 
stood the  ravages  of  time  and  the  assaults  of 
those  who  have  been  unwilling  to  accept  his 
opinions.  His  '  Decline  and  Fall'  has  scientific 
thoroness  and  also  artistic  fascination.  The 
ample  narrative  flows  unimpeded  thru  his  pages; 
68 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

and  his  foot-notes  do  not  obstruct  the  current, 
even  if  they  are  often  as  good  reading  as  the  text 
itself. 

More  than  half  a  century  later,  Mommsen  put 
forth  his  history  of  Rome,  constructed  by  a 
mighty  effort  of  historic  interpretation  and  only 
occasionally  weighted  down  by  a  foot-note 
which  might  distract  the  attention  of  the  general 
reader,  for  whose  benefit  it  had  been  directly 
prepared.  Apparently,the  great  German  historian 
felt  that  to  vaunt  his  own  researches  and  his  own 
original  interpretations  and  to  thrust  forward  the 
sources  of  his  extended  knowledge  would  be  an 
act  akin  to  that  of  the  architect  of  a  towering 
cathedral,  who  should  insist  on  leaving  up  the 
scaffolding  which  had  facilitated  its  erection. 
Mommsen  conscientiously  addrest  his  history  of 
Rome  to  the  general  reader,  and  took  his  meas- 
ures accordingly  not  to  repel  but  to  attract  this 
reader.  His  constitutional  history,  on  the  other 
hand,  from  the  very  nature  of  its  subject,  could 
not  appeal  to  the  general  reader,  but  only  to  the 
specialist  in  political  science.  Therefore  this 
later  work  was  very  properly  prepared  upon  a 
different  plan;  it  was  designed  for  the  more 
restricted  group  of  professional  students,  and  for 
their  sake  it  was  buttrest  with  quotations,  cita- 
tions and  references. 

There  is  no  warrant  for  the  prevalent  belief 
69 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

that  there  is  a  necessary  conflict  between  scien- 
tific thoroness  in  preparation  and  artistic  attrac- 
tiveness of  presentation.  The  scientific  historian 
may  very  properly  despise  the  essential  falsity  of 
Carlyle's  'French  Revolution';  but  the  only 
sound  basis  for  their  contemptuous  dislike  must 
be  sought  in  the  Scotch  humorist's  wilful  neg- 
lect of  necessary  information  of  which  he  might 
easily  have  availed  himself,  and  not  in  the  inter- 
pretative imagination  he  displayed  in  evoking  the 
striking  figures  of  that  strange  turmoil.  Carlyle 
is  to  be  discredited,  not  because  he  had  the  skill 
of  a  literary  artist,  but  because  he  was  wanting 
in  scientific  integrity.  And  this  is  also  the  ver- 
dict which  must  be  rendered  upon  the  histories 
of  Carlyle's  disciple,  Froude.  The  two  British 
historians  have  fallen  out  of  favor  with  serious 
students,  not  on  account  of  their  possession  of 
art  but  on  account  of  their  lack  of  science.  As 
Gibbon  proved,  and  Mommsen  also,  science  and 
art  are  not  incompatible  or  even  hostile. 

Perhaps  there  is  no  better  example  of  the  skil- 
ful driving  of  science  and  art  harnest  to  the  same 
wagon,  than  can  be  found  in  Gaston  Boissier's 
illuminating  studies  of  Roman  life  and  character 
in  the  last  days  of  the  Republic  and  the  early 
days  of  the  Empire.  In  this  great  scholar's  pages 
Cicero  and  his  friends  stand  out  as  they  lived; 
the  springs  of  their  actions  and  the  temper  of  their 
70 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

minds  are  laid  bare.  These  vital  portraits  are 
the  result  of  the  utmost  intimacy  with  the  records 
left  by  Cicero  and  his  contemporaries,  and  with 
the  latest  researches  of  the  humblest  investiga- 
tors. No  doubt  has  ever  been  cast  upon  the  so- 
lidity of  Boissier's  scientific  knowledge  of  the 
period  or  of  the  persons  he  presented  to  us. 
Boissier  is  as  scientific  as  Gibbon  or  as  Momm- 
sen,  and,  like  them,  he  refrained  from  all  wanton 
parade  of  his  scholarship.  When  he  composed 
one  of  his  interpretative  resuscitations  he  abided 
by  his  own  explanation;  like  the  orator,  he 
sought  to  convince  and  to  persuade;  he  addrest 
himself  to  the  general  public;  he  took  pains  to 
be  clear;  he  arranged  his  matter  carefully;  he 
developt  his  ideas  into  generalities;  he  wanted 
to  be  comprehended  by  all.  And  in  thus  achiev- 
ing art  he  did  not  forgo  science;  that  was  the 
solid  support  of  his  alluring  essays;  that  was  the 
steel  frame,  hidden  within  and  yet  supporting  the 
external  beauty  of  his  marble  arches. 

In  Gaston  Boissier's  books  art  is  always  visi- 
ble and  science  is  ever  concealed.  There  is  rarely 
a  Latin  quotation  or  even  a  Latin  word;  and  any 
foreign  term,  when  it  does  occur,  is  invariably 
elucidated  for  the  benefit  of  those  unfamiliar  with 
the  language  of  the  Romans.  There  is  scarcely  a1 
foot-note,  except  now  and  again  the  citation  of  an 
authority  or  a  courteous  reference  to  the  explana- 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

tion  put  forth  by  some  other  scholar.  Indeed, 
Boissier's  foot-notes  are  fewer  than  Mommsen's 
and  far  fewer  than  Gibbon's;  and  when  he  traces 
for  us  the  intricate  complexities  of  the  opposition 
under  the  Caesars,  our  attention  is  never  distract- 
ed from  the  pellucid  narrative  in  which  he  has 
distilled  the  results  of  his  indefatigable  study. 
Above  all,  his  writings  are  wholly  free  from  all 
controversy  over  the  opinions  of  other  scholars 
with  whom  he  has  failed  to  find  himself  in  ac- 
cord, and  we  are  never  detained  or  annoyed  by 
acrimonious  wranglings  or  by  discourteous  per- 
sonalities. He  is  as  unpedantic  as  may  be;  he 
writes  like  a  man  of  the  world,  familiar  with  all 
that  has  happened  since  the  period  he  is  dealing 
with,  and  apt  in  recalling  modern  instances  to  il- 
luminate ancient  conditions.  He  is  continually 
explaining  the  present  by  the  past,  and  the  past 
by  the  present.  His  attitude  is  always  that  of  a 
courteous  host,  who  welcomes  us  by  setting  be- 
fore us  his  best  wine,  but  who  never  insists  on 
our  inspecting  the  ample  cellars  whence  his 
choice  vintages  have  been  drawn. 

There  is  an  old  saying  that  a  good  workman  is 
known  by  his  chips;  yet  the  accomplisht  crafts- 
man does  not  send  these  chips  to  the  customer  to 
certify  his  workmanship.  He  lets  the  product  of 
his  labor  speak  for  itself,  and  he  is  never  tempted 
to  invite  the  rest  of  us  into  the  workshop  that  we 
may  spy  into  the  secrets  of  his  trade.  Now,  this 
72 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

is  just  what  many  modern  craftsmen  persist  in 
doing,  seduced  by  the  bad  example  of  the  Ger- 
mans and  neglecting  the  good  example  of  the 
French.  They  demand  that  we  take  notice  of 
the  skeleton,  overlooking  the  fact  that  only  the 
tortoise  wears  his  backbone  on  the  outside  and 
that  the  higher  vertebrates  prefer  to  conceal 
theirs.  This  scientific  skeleton  ought  to  sustain 
the  body,  no  doubt,  but  there  is  no  need  to  force 
it  into  view.  Perhaps  this  parade  of  the  neces- 
sary apparatus  may  be  pardoned  in  young  schol- 
ars, in  whose  work  it  is  the  evidence  of  adequate 
preparation.  But  it  is  no  longer  needed  when 
the  neophyte  has  won  his  spurs.  The  more  ma- 
ture writer  may  dismiss  his  list  of  authorities  and 
all  his  paraphernalia  of  bibliography  to  the  harm- 
less and  necessary  appendix,  which  may  serve  as 
a  reservoir  of  information  for  the  benefit  of  those 
who  wish  to  drink  deep.  When  his  'prentice 
years  are  left  behind  him,  he  need  not  feel  called 
upon  to  prove  his  acquaintance  with  the  tools  of 
his  trade.  This  is  then  to  be  taken  for  granted; 
and  there  is  no  necessity  to  flaunt  it  in  the  face 
of  the  general  reader. 

That  it  is  possible  to  unite  scientific  thoroness 
and  artistic  presentation  has  been  proved  by 
Gibbon  and  Mommsen,  Boissier  and  Parkman, 
an  Englishman  and  a  German,  a  Frenchman  and 
an  American.  The  ability  to  do  this  is  not  the 
exclusive  possession  of  the  scholars  of  any  one 

73 


IN  BEHALF  OF  THE  GENERAL  READER 

nationality,  altho  it  is  more  common  among  the 
French,  since  they  are  franker  in  their  recognition 
of  the  social  instinct.  It  can  be  discovered  in  the 
Greek  studies  of  Jebb  and  Butcher,  and  in  the 
American  histories  of  Motley.  It  is  as  evi- 
dent in  the  biological  essays  of  Huxley  as 
in  the  psychologic  papers  of  William  James. 
Indeed,  it  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  better 
example  of  the  combination  of  science  and 
art  than  can  be  discovered  in  the  brilliant  pages 
of  James.  His  discussions  of  the  complex  prob- 
lems of  physiological  psychology — discussions 
rich  in  speculative  suggestions,  wealthy  with 
original  inquiry,  and  with  imaginative  ingenu- 
ity— are  yet  so  simply  stated  that  they  can  be 
understood  by  every  one.  They  are  contri- 
butions to  science  which  only  his  fellow-scien- 
tists can  properly  appreciate;  but  none  the  less 
do  they  appeal  to  the  average  reader  of  average 
education  and  of  average  intelligence. 

To  write  so  as  to  satisfy  one's  equals  and  so  as 
to  appeal  also  to  those  who  are  not  specialists, — 
that  is  not  easy.  Yet  it  can  be  achieved  by  tak- 
ing thought;  and  it  is  worth  all  the  pains  it  costs. 
That  way  wisdom  lies;  and  the  sooner  Ameri- 
can scholars  recognize  this  truth,  the  better  it 
will  be  for  the  future, — if  our  literature  is  to  be 
enricht  with  books  that  are  books  and  not  merely 
library  furniture. 

(1911.) 

74 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 


IV 
THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

ONCE  when  1  was  chatting  about  the  princi- 
ples of  literary  art  with  Mr.  Rudyard  Kip- 
ling, I  chanced  to  tell  him  that  I  had  pointed  out 
to  a  class  of  college  students  the  several  masters 
of  story-telling  in  whose  footsteps  he  had  trod 
and  by  whose  examples  he  had  obviously  profit- 
ed. He  smiled  pleasantly  and  then  slily  drawled 
out,  "Why  give  it  away?  Why  not  let  them 
think  it  was  just  genius?" 

This  was  a  shrewd  retort.  The  craftsman 
himself,  in  whatsoever  art  he  may  be  laboring, 
is  always  intensely  interested  in  its  technic,  in 
its  traditions,  and  in  its  processes.  But  the  public 
he  is  addressing  has  a  positive  distaste  for  being 
taken  into  the  workshop  and  for  having  its  at- 
tention called  to  the  scattered  chips.  It  prefers 
to  believe  that  the  masterpiece  it  blindly  admires 
is  the  result  of  intangible  and  inexplicable  genius. 
It  likes  to  look  upon  the  artist  as  a  magician,  as 
a  wonder-worker,  and  it  is  inclined  to  resent 
77 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

any  disclosure  of  the  hidden  means  whereby  he 
has  wrought  his  marvels.  Whenever  the  rest  of 
us  are  allowed  a  glimpse,  however  fleeting,  into 
the  studio  or  the  laboratory,  whenever  the  suc- 
cessive stages  of  the  making  of  a  masterpiece 
are  laid  bare  before  our  eyes,  the  mystery  of  its 
creation  is  torn  away,  and  as  a  result  its  reputa- 
tion is  instantly  lowered. 

Moore  dealt  a  sad  blow  to  the  fame  of  Richard 
Brinsley  Sheridan  when  he  printed  the  tentative 
drafts  of  the  'School  for  Scandal'  and  revealed 
the  varied  hesitations  which  had  accompanied 
the  composition  of  that  brilliant  comedy.  Poe 
disenchanted  a  host  of  his  admirers  when  he 
publisht  the  'Philosophy  of  Composition'  and 
proclaimed  aloud  the  motives  and  the  methods 
whereby  he  had  achieved  the  haunting  melan- 
choly of  the  'Raven.'  The  celebrity  of  Shak- 
spere  and  of  Moliere  is  the  more  solidly  establisht 
with  the  public  at  large  because  neither  of  them 
ever  rent  the  veil  which  shrouded  from  vulgar 
gaze  the  secret  of  their  supreme  achievements. 
They  abide  our  question,  but  they  proffer  no 
clues  for  its  solution.  We  are  left  guessing  as 
to  the  exciting  cause  of  this  tragedy  or  of  that 
comedy;  we  may  assure  ourselves,  if  we  choose, 
that  infinite  pains  went  to  its  making,  but  none 
the  less  does  the  work  itself  stand  forth  in  its 
simple  perfection,  not  narrowed  in  our  gaze  by 
78 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

any  commentary  of  its  author.  It  is  what  it  is, 
and  we  can  read  into  it  whatever  we  please, 
since  we  can  surmise  the  intent  only  by  the  re- 
sult. Shakspere  and  Moliere  may  have  builded 
better  than  they  knew;  but  as  to  this  they  have 
made  no  confession,  and  we  are  reduced  to  con- 
jecture only.  If  their  art  cannot  always  conceal 
itself  absolutely,  at  least  it  avoids  all  overt  self- 
revelation. 

Stevenson  was  a  little  like  Poe  in  his  fondness 
for  talking  about  himself,  and  in  his  constant 
interest  in  analizing  the  arduous  problems  of 
style  and  of  structure  and  the  hidden  principles 
of  honest  narrative.  Perhaps  there  is  no  more 
characteristic  passage  in  all  his  writings — and 
certainly  there  is  none  more  illuminating — than 
that  in  which  he  described  his  own  apprentice- 
ship to  the  art  of  letters.  It  is  in  his  delightfully 
personal  paper  on  'An  Old  College  Magazine' 
(in  which  he  went  back  joyfully  to  his  under- 
graduate days  at  Edinburgh)  that  he  made  his 
significant  record  of  his  own  stylistic  experi- 
ments: "I  kept  always  two  books  in  my  pocket, 
one  to  read  and  one  to  write  in.  Whenever  I 
read  a  book  or  a  passage  that  particularly  pleased 
me,  in  which  a  thing  was  said  or  an  effect  ren- 
dered with  propriety,  in  which  there  was  some 
conspicuous  force  or  happy  distinction  in  the 
style,  I  must  sit  down  at  once  and  set  myself  to 

79 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

ape  that  quality.  I  was  unsuccessful  and  knew 
it.  I  tried  again  and  was  again  unsuccessful,  and 
always  unsuccessful,  but  at  least  in  these  vain 
hours  I  got  some  practice  in  rhythm,  in  harmony 
and  construction  and  coordination  of  parts.  I 
have  thus  played  the  sedulous  ape  to  Hazlitt,  to 
Lamb,  to  Wordsworth,  to  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
to  Defoe,  to  Hawthorne,  to  Montaigne,  to  Baude- 
laire and  Obermann."  Then  he  added  that  one 
essay  of  his,  composed  at  first  in  imitation  of 
Hazlitt,  had  been  rewritten  in  imitation  of  Ruskin, 
only  to  emerge  again  and  at  last  as  an  imitation 
of  Sir  Thomas  Browne. 

To  this  frank  avowal  Stevenson  appended  the 
moral, — "that,  like  it  or  not,  is  the  way  to  learn 
to  write."  And  he  adduced  in  proof  that  "it 
was  so  Keats  learnt,  and  there  never  was  a  finer 
temperament";  so  also  Montaigne  and  Burns 
learnt,  and  "Shakspere  himself,  the  imperial." 
The  moral  Stevenson  drew  has  been  rejected  by 
not  a  few  youthful  critics  who  have  never  put 
themselves  thru  this  severe  gymnastic;  they  have 
scoft  both  at  his  precept  and  at  its  result  in  his 
own  practice.  His  style  has  been  described  as 
"dextrous,  wonderful,  fascinating,"  an  "ex- 
quisitely elaborated  piece  of  mosaic,  but  too  self- 
conscious  to  be  called  good  architecture." 

But  even  if  this  assault  on  Stevenson's  prac- 
tice might  be  accepted,  it  would  not  invalidate 
80 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

his  precept.  Newman's  style  is  not  open  to  any 
of  the  exceptions  which  may  be  urged  against 
Stevenson's;  it  is  not  a  self-conscious  piece  of 
mosaic;  it  is  "good  architecture."  And  in  his 
'Idea  of  a  University'  Newman  had  already  de- 
clared the  principle  which  Stevenson  was  to  re- 
affirm ;  and  he  had  already  confest  that  he  too  had 
played  the  sedulous  ape.  He  asserted  that  there 
were  certain  masters  of  literature  whose  style 
"forcibly  arrests  the  reader,  and  draws  him  on 
to  imitate  it,  by  virtue  of  what  is  excellent  in  it, 
in  spite  of  such  defects  as,  in  common  with  all 
human  works,  it  may  contain.  I  suppose  all  of 
us  will  recognize  this  fascination."  Then  comes 
the  avowal  which  is  so  curiously  akin  to  Steven- 
son's. "For  myself,  when  I  was  fourteen  to 
fifteen,  I  imitated  Addison;  when  I  was  seven- 
teen, I  wrote  in  the  style  of  Johnson;  about  the 
same  time  I  fell  in  with  the  twelfth  volume  of 
Gibbon,  and  my  ears  rang  with  the  cadence  of  his 
sentences,  and  I  dreamt  of  it  for  a  night  or  two. 
Then  I  began  to  make  an  analysis  of  Thucydides 
in  Gibbon's  style." 

We  may  go  even  farther  back  and  find  the 
confession  of  Newman  and  of  Stevenson  antici- 
pated by  Franklin,  who  has  recorded  in  his  'Au- 
tobiography' how  he  in  his  time  had  played  the 
sedulous  ape  to  Steele  and  Addison,  dissecting 
the  essays  of  the  stray  volume  of  the  'Spectator' 
Si 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

which  had  fallen  into  his  hands,  and  combining 
again  the  fragments  in  the  strenuous  effort  to 
surprize  the  secret  of  their  easy  clarity.  But 
there  is  no  need  to  multiply  examples.  Of  a 
truth,  "that  is  the  way  to  learn  to  write," — to 
study  in  the  workshop  of  the  masters  and  to 
seek  to  use  their  tools  as  best  we  can. 

It  is  not  style  only  which  can  be  acquired  by 
this  method,  but  structure  also,  the  larger  frame- 
work of  an  essay  or  of  a  novel,  of  a  play  or  of  a 
history.  The  'Strange  Case  of  Dr.  Jekyll  and 
Mr.  Hyde '  would  never  have  come  into  being  if 
Poe  and  Hawthorne  had  not  pointed  out  the 
path  to  its  narrator;  and  David  Balfour  would  not 
have  been  able  to  risk  his  many  unexpected  ex- 
periences if  the  valiant  heroes  of  Defoe  and  Scott 
and  Dumas  had  not  already  gone  in  quest  of  ad- 
venture. It  is  thus  that  the  novice  can  teach 
himself  to  say  what  he  has  to  say,  how  to  digest 
his  material,  how  to  shape  it  for  the  public  eye, 
how  to  present  it  to  the  best  advantage.  He 
must  learn  this  difficult  art  from  many  masters  in 
turn,  absorbing  the  processes  of  each  of  them, 
assimilating  their  methods  and  finding  out  at 
last  how  to  be  himself. 

Of  course,  he  must  not  linger  too  long  at  the 

feet  of  any  of  his  instructors  or  he  will  run  the 

risk  of  being  a  copyist  only.     If  he  does  that,  he 

will  take  over  the  faults  of  his  model,  rather  than 

82 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

the  merits,  since  these  are  more  easily  caught. 
There  is  safety  in  numbers,  when  each  of  the 
teachers  serves  as  a  corrective  of  the  others,  un- 
til the  'prentice  artist  comes  into  an  originality 
of  his  own,  compounded  of  many  simples.  As 
Gounod  once  wrote  to  a  friend,  "  Don't  listen  to 
those  who  tell  you  not  to  imitate  the  masters; 
that  is  not  true.  You  must  not  imitate  one,  but 
all  of  them.  You  can  become  a  master  yourself 
only  on  condition  that  you  are  akin  to  the  best." 
And  Legouve  said  the  same  thing:  "the  only 
way  not  to  copy  anybody  is  to  study  every- 
body." 

This  is  the  advice  of  the  wise  critics  as  well  as 
of  the  wise  artists.  Quintilian  laid  down  the 
law  long  ago:  "A  great  portion  of  art  consists 
in  imitation,  since  tho  to  invent  was  first  in 
order  of  time,  and  holds  the  first  place  in  merit, 
yet  it  is  of  advantage  to  imitate  what  has  been 
invented  with  success. "  Ben  Jonson  was  as  em- 
phatic in  urging  the  duty  of  imitation  as  Sir 
Joshua  Reynolds  was  to  be.  And  only  a  little 
while  ago  Brunetiere  repeated  forcibly  the  coun- 
sel of  these  elders:  "  We  begin  by  imitating  our 
models  or  our  masters;  and  we  can  do  nothing 
better,  for  if  we  are  unwilling  to  imitate  or  to 
follow  anybody,  life  would  be  over  before  we 
could  get  to  work,  and  it  is  well  also  that  every 
generation  should  continue  its  predecessor." 

83 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

This  last  remark  is  specially  suggestive.  No 
one  of  us  should  renounce  the  heritage  of  the 
ages,  and  no  one  of  us  could,  if  he  would.  We 
cannot  help  being  our  own  contemporaries,  who 
are  all  continuing  our  predecessors,  consciously 
or  unconsciously.  The  beginner  must  imitate 
somebody,  since  no  art  can  be  born  again  for  his 
own  benefit.  And  if  this  could  be,  it  would  not 
be  for  his  benefit  but  for  his  perdition.  The 
primitives  belong  in  their  own  period,  and  they 
have  their  own  appeal;  but  they  are  out  of  place 
today,  and  even  if  any  of  us  wanted  to  vie  with 
them,  it  is  out  of  his  power  to  turn  back  the 
hands  of  the  clock. 

The  beginner  cannot  make  a  fresh  start  for 
himself  and  deny  himself  the  advantage  of  what 
has  already  been  accomplisht  in  his  art.  If  he 
renounces  the  privilege  of  threading  the  narrow 
paths  trodden  by  three  or  four  of  the  most  im- 
portant and  most  individual  of  those  who  have 
carried  the  torch  ahead,  he  must  perforce  walk  in 
the  broad  road  tramped  by  the  less  important 
and  the  less  individual.  He  has  to  choose  whether 
he  will  seek  to  follow  the  real  leaders  or  be  satis- 
fied with  the  uninspired  methods  of  the  com- 
mon herd  who  struggle  aimlessly  in  the  rear. 
When  the  conceit  of  immaturity  prompts  an  am- 
bitious youngster  to  the  vain  vaunt  that  he  has 
not  read  the  salient  works  of  the  great  men,  he 
84 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

is  at  once  confronted  by  a  dilemma — either  he 
had  to  read  the  minor  writings  of  the  lesser  men, 
or  else  he  has  read  nothing  at  all.  Imitation  of 
some  sort  there  must  be.  Why  not  get  the  best  ? 
And  why  seek  prematurely  for  sharp  originality, 
since  that  can  be  achieved  in  time  only  by  the 
riper  development  of  the  artist's  own  personality? 
It  is  not  by  early  audacities  that  a  young  man  can 
affirm  himself,  but  only  by  a  patient  acquisition 
of  the  traditional  methods,  which  are  the  slow  ac- 
cumulation of  inherited  experience.  As  a  French 
critic  recently  put  it  succinctly:  "  If  you  begin 
with  the  end,  you  are  in  danger  of  ending  with 
the  beginning;  and  if  early  works  that  are  labored 
do  not  imply  future  mastery,  early  works  that 
are  masterly  are  the  manifestation  of  an  artist 
without  personality." 

The  artist  can  be  individual,  he  can  have  an 
accent  of  his  own,  he  can  separate  himself  from 
his  fellows,  only  as  his  own  personality  mani- 
fests itself,  which  it  is  not  apt  to  do  in  youth  and 
which  it  cannot  do  until  the  artist  has  learnt  his 
trade.  Only  by  imitation  can  he  acquire  it;  and 
imitation  is  therefore  his  duty, — independent 
imitation  and  not  slavish  copying.  ' '  It  is  a  neces- 
sary and  warrantable  pride  to  disclaim  to  walk 
servilely  behind  any  individual,  however  elevated 
his  rank,"  said  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds,  with  his  cus- 
tomary common  sense.  "The  true  and  liberal 

85 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

ground  of  imitation  is  an  open  field;  where,  tho 
he  who  precedes  has  had  the  advantage  of  start- 
ing before  you,  you  may  always  purpose  to  over- 
take him;  it  is  enough,  however,  to  pursue  his 
course;  you  need  not  tread  in  his  footsteps,  and 
you  certainly  have  a  right  to  outstrip  him  if  you 
can." 

Since  true  originality  is  the  expression  of  one's 
own  personality,  it  cannot  wisely  be  sought  for 
deliberately.  It  will  reveal  itself  when  it  exists, 
and  it  cannot  be  forced.  It  must  mature  of  its  own 
accord.  No  man  can,  by  taking  thought,  make 
an  originality  for  himself.  Lowell  was  as  shrewd 
as  usual  when  he  asserted  that  "if  a  poet  resolve 
to  be  original,  it  will  end  commonly  in  his  being 
peculiar."  And  even  the  youngest  of  poets 
ought  to  be  able  to  seize  the  difference  between 
originality  and  peculiarity.  It  was  not  by  strain- 
ing for  peculiarity  that  Milton  made  himself  one 
of  the  most  original  of  English  poets,  but  by 
loving  imitation  of  that  one  of  his  predecessors 
whom  he  most  admired.  "Milton  was  the  po- 
etical son  of  Spenser,"  so  Dryden  declared;  "for 
we  have  our  lineal  descents  and  clans  as  well  as 
other  families."  Then  he  added  his  direct  testi- 
mony:— "Milton  has  acknowledged  to  me  that 
Spenser  was  his  original."  Tho  Milton  chose  to 
confess  the  imitation  of  Spenser,  it  is  easy  for  us 
to  perceive  now  that  he  had  also  not  a  few  other 
86 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

originals  before  him, — Sophocles  and  Vergil, 
Dante  and  Shakspere.  As  Stevenson  said  in  his 
own  confession,  "Perhaps  I  hear  some  one  cry 
out:  But  this  is  not  the  way  to  be  original!  It  is 
not;  nor  is  there  any  way  but  to  be  born  so. 
Nor  yet,  if  you  are  born  original,  is  there  any- 
thing in  this  training  that  shall  clip  the  wings  of 
your  originality." 

No  authors  have  ultimately  attained  to  a  truer 
originality  than  Shakspere  and  Moliere,  an  origi- 
nality both  of  form  and  of  content.  Shakspere 
was  able  to  give  us  at  last  the  final  model  of 
modern  tragedy,  and  Moliere  succeeded  in  per- 
fecting the  final  model  of  modern  comedy.  Lf 
they  had  indulged  in  the  delightful  amusement 
of  talking  about  themselves,  they  would  both  have 
avowed  unhesitatingly  that  they  also  had  been 
sedulous  apes  in  their  youthful  years  of  author- 
ship, when  they  were  cautiously  feeling  their 
way  and  before  they  had  come  into  their  own. 
Moli£re's  earliest  pieces  are  so  closely  in  accord 
with  the  tradition  of  the  Italian  comedy-of-masks 
that  the  '£tourdi,'  for  example,  might  be  held  up 
for  study  as  the  finest  specimen  of  this  species. 
The  Italians  supplied  him  with  a  ready-made 
mold  into  which  he  could  pour  whatever  he  had 
of  his  own. 

Shakspere  started  out  also  as  an  humble  imi- 
tator, not  of  an  exotic  form  such  as  tempted 
87 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

Moliere,  but  of  several  specific  predecessors  in 
his  own  language.  He  was  obviously  unorigi- 
nal in  his  early  pieces,  even  in  'Love's  Labor's 
Lost,'  almost  the  only  play  of  his  the  actual 
source  of  which  has  not  yet  been  discovered.  In 
'Love's  Labor's  Lost'  he  was  imitating  Lyly;  in 
'Titus  Andronicus'  he  was  imitating  Kyd;  in 
'  Richard  II '  he  was  imitating  Marlowe.  At  first 
he  played  their  game;  they  were  his  teachers 
then,  altho  he  was  soon  able  to  beat  them  at  it. 
In  these  'prentice  plays  there  is  to  be  detected 
very  little  of  his  individuality;  and  we  can  catch 
in  them  only  a  faint  premonition  of  the  richer 
Shaksperian  accent  which  was  in  time  to  charac- 
terize all  that  he  put  his  hand  to.  They  are  not 
yet  markt  boldly  with  his  image  and  superscrip- 
tion. They  are  the  trial  essays  of  a  clever  and 
ambitious  young  fellow,  experimental  and  almost 
empty  when  compared  with  the  certainty  and  the 
fulness  of  his  riper  works  after  he  had  found  him- 
self, after  he  had  come  into  his  own,  and  after  he 
had  amply  developed  his  originality.  And  it  was 
by  the  imitation  of  Lyly  and  Kyd  and  Marlowe 
that  he  taught  himself  how  to  tell  a  story  on  the 
stage.  When  his  hour  came  he  was  ready  to  do 
loftier  things  than  they  had  ever  dared;  but  it 
was  only  by  the  aid  of  the  weapons  that  he  had 
wrested  from  their  hands  that  he  was  able  to 
vanquish  them. 

88 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

Brunetiere,  to  whom  we  owe  the  first  serious 
attempt  to  study  the  evolution  of  the  several 
literary  species,  comedy  and  tragedy,  the  novel 
and  the  lyric,  maintained  that  these  types  were 
transmitted  by  direct  imitation  and  that  they 
were  modified  by  deliberate  refusal  to  imitate. 
Whereas  Regnard  and  Marivaux  and  Beaumar- 
chais  continued  the  comedy  of  Moliere,  each  of 
them  adapting  the  tradition  to  his  own  need  of 
self-expression,  Racine  wilfully  reacted  against 
the  influence  of  Corneille  and  sought  to  make 
tragedy  in  certain  of  its  manifestations  exactly 
the  opposite  of  what  it  had  been  in  the  hands  of 
his  mighty  predecessor.  So  we  can  discern  one 
explanation  for  the  rigid  skeleton  of  Ben  Jonson's 
tragedies  in  his  desire  to  depart  from  the  looser 
Shaksperian  formula;  he  was  subject  to  its  influ- 
ence as  fully  as  if  he  had  accepted  it  instead  of 
rejecting  it  violently.  Racine  and  Jonson  refused 
to  do  what  their  older  contemporaries  had  been 
wont  to  do;  indeed,  they  insisted  on  doing  the 
very  opposite.  And  altho  this  may  seem  like  a 
denial  of  imitation,  it  is  only  another  applica- 
tion of  the  principle. 

Few  attempts  have  been  made  to  trace  the 
long  evolution  of  any  single  literary  species  in 
the  whole  course  of  English  literature  in  both  its 
branches,  British  and  American;  and  quite  the 
best  of  them  is  the  admirable  history  of  English 
89 


THE  DUTY  OF  IMITATION 

tragedy  for  which  we  are  indebted  to  Professor 
Thorndike.  It  is  significant  that  his  investiga- 
tions have  led  him  to  a  conclusion  almost  the 
same  as  Brunetiere's.  In  his  final  chapter  he 
calls  attention  to  "the  extraordinary  force  that 
imitation  has  exercised  in  the  creation  of  tragedy. 
It  seems,  indeed,  the  generating  power.  Men 
are  forever  imitating,  but  they  cannot  imitate 
without  change.  In  these  changes,  the  varia- 
tions due  to  environment, — personal,  theatrical, 
literary,  social, — arise  the  individual  peculiarities, 
the  beginnings  of  new  species,  the  element  of 
growth.  .  .  .  Destroy  the  faculty  of  imitation, 
and  the  generation  of  new  forms  would  seem  to 
be  well-nigh  impossible." 

If  this  assertion  is  well  founded, — and  the 
more  we  study  literary  evolution  the  less  likely 
we  are  to  dispute  it, — then  imitation  is  not  only 
the  solid  foundation  for  an  ample  development 
of  any  art,  it  is  also  the  strict  duty  of  every  artist 
in  the  formative  period  of  his  career. 

(1910.) 


90 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 


V 
THE   DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

TWO  things  must  be  admitted  in  advance  by 
all  who  adventure  themselves  in  literary 
criticism.  The  first  of  these  is  that  a  work  of 
art  which  has  been  praised  by  experts,  and 
which  has  pleased  long  and  pleased  many,  in  all 
probability  possesses  qualities  which  justify  its 
success, — or  which  at  least  explain  this.  And 
the  second  is  that  the  most  stimulating  criticism 
is  likely  to  spring  from  sympathetic  appreciation, 
and  that  the  criticism  which  has  its  root  in  an- 
tipathy is  likely  to  be  sterile.  But  even  if  both 
these  things  must  be  granted,  it  does  not  follow 
that  adverse  criticism,  even  of  those  whose  fame 
may  seem  to  be  most  solidly  founded,  is  any  the 
less  useful.  In  every  generation  we  have  to  re- 
vise the  verdicts  rendered  by  the  generations 
that  went  before;  and  this  is  possible  only  when 
we  are  willing  to  reopen  the  case  and  to  listen  to 
fresh  argument. 

The  result  of  these  successive   revaluations, 
century  after  century,  is  often  very  surprizing. 

93 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

Sometimes  an  author  is  unexpectedly  raised  aloft 
to  an  eminence  which  would  have  astonisht  his 
contemporaries;  and  sometimes  he  is  cast  down 
from  the  exalted  pinnacle  to  which  his  contem- 
poraries had  lifted  him.  Swift,  for  example,  af- 
fected to  forget  even  Defoe's  name,  alluding  to 
him  contemptuously  as  the  man  who  had  stood 
in  the  pillory;  but  posterity  has  seen  fit  to  bestow 
on  'Robinson  Crusoe '  a  reputation  surpassing 
even  that  of  '  Gulliver's  Travels.'  And  however 
popular  the  '  Pilgrim's  Progress '  may  have  been 
with  the  plain  people  when  it  first  appeared, 
probably  no  one  of  the  men  of  letters  of  Bunyan's 
own  time  so  much  as  suspected  its  abiding  value. 
For  nearly  a  century  after  it  had  been  going 
thru  edition  after  edition,  '  Don  Quixote'  was 
curtly  dismist  as  little  better  than  a  jest-book. 
On  the  other  hand,  Pope  was  esteemed  by  con- 
temporary critics  not  only  as  indisputably  the 
greatest  poet  of  his  own  language  and  of  his  own 
time,  but  also  the  greatest  poet  who  had  ever 
written  at  any  time  in  any  language;  and  yet, 
less  than  a  hundred  years  after  his  death,  the 
real  question  was  not  whether  he  was  a  great 
poet,  but  whether  he  was  justly  entitled  to  be 
considered  a  poet  at  all.  The  admirers  of  the 
British  bard  saw  his  vaunted  pre-eminence  shrivel 
away,  until  there  were  few  so  poor  to  do  him  rev- 
erence. This  revaluation  was  due  to  the  slow  dis- 
94 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

integration  of  an  establisht  reputation,  in  conse- 
quence of  the  steady  pressure  exerted  by  adverse 
criticism  not  intimidated  by  the  prestige  of  an 
overwhelming  vogue.  And  the  adverse  criticism, 
devoid  of  enthusiasm,  indeed  frankly  hostile,  bent 
on  seeing  the  thing  criticized  as  it  really  was, 
cannot  be  called  sterile,  offensive  as  it  may  have 
been  to  those  ardent  admirers  of  the  disestab- 
lish! god  who  had  resolutely  refused  to  look  at 
the  clay  feet  of  their  idol. 

Moreover,  not  a  little  of  the  eulogy  bestowed 
even  upon  the  mightiest  names  of  the  past  is  un- 
discriminating  and  therefore  misleading  and  mis- 
chievous. These  masters  are  often  overpraised 
for  what  they  did;  and  they  are  also  praised  for 
what  they  have  never  attempted.  We  find  the 
careless  critic  assuming  that  because  they  are  un- 
deniably great,  they  are  equally  great  in  all  aspects 
of  their  genius;  and  this  is  not  true  even  of  the 
foremost  of  them.  It  is  doing  an  ill  service  to 
the  masters  to  praise  them  in  the  wrong  place 
and  for  the  wrong  reason.  This  midsummer 
madness  of  alleged  criticism  is  perhaps  most 
frequently  discoverable  in  German  attempts  to 
illuminate  Shakspere;  but  it  is  visible  also  in  a 
large  proportion  of  the  lavish  praise  with  which 
Scott  and  Dickens  are  continually  besprinkled. 
Some  critics  seem  to  have  a  Parsee-like  inability 
to  see  the  spots  on  the  sun  they  worship. 

95 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

Here  we  may  profit  by  the  example  of  the 
Roman  Catholic  Church,  which  keeps  alive  the 
honorable  custom  of  adding  to  the  number  of  the 
saints.  From  time  to  time  it  elects  to  this 
blessed  company  those  holy  men  whose  lives 
are  a  perpetual  example.  But  it  is  characteristi- 
cally shrewd  in  its  procedure;  and  it  has  taken 
wise  precautions  to  prevent  its  being  imposed 
upon.  It  has  guarded  itself  carefully  against  the 
danger  of  having  unworthy  men  foisted  into  the 
glorious  body  of  the  beatified.  Not  satisfied 
with  the  popular  belief  that  a  man  belongs  to 
the  noble  army  of  martyrs  and  confessors,  it  in- 
sists that  his  admirers  shall  prove  that  he  is  truly 
worthy  to  be  enrolled  with  the  older  saints.  It 
has  prescribed  that  a  fair  trial  shall  take  place, 
and,  as  a  rule,  not  until  a  half-century  after  the 
candidate's  death;  and  it  has  ordained  that  an 
opposing  counsel  shall  be  appointed  whose  duty 
it  is  to  bring  up  all  that  can  be  said  against  him. 
This  officer  of  the  court  has  the  privilege  of  free 
speech;  he  is  authorized  to  analize  all  the  evi- 
dence presented  by  those  who  have  proposed 
the  beatification,  and  he  is  expected  to  do  his 
best  to  prevent  them  from  getting  their  saint 
unless  they  can  make  out  a  clear  case.  This  use- 
ful functionary  is  known  as  the  Devil's  Advocate. 

The  duties  of  the  Devil's  Advocate  may  not 
always  be  pleasant  for  the  official  appointed  to 
96 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

the  post;  but  there  is  an  obvious  necessity  that 
the  task  imposed  on  him  should  be  undertaken 
by  some  one.  And  it  is  not  only  in  the  Church 
of  Rome  that  the  Devil's  Advocate  can  render 
useful  service.  There  is  an  unending  demand 
for  volunteers  to  fill  this  position  in  other  than 
ecclesiastical  affairs.  The  general  acceptance  of 
the  maxim  that  we  must  not  speak  ill  of  the 
dead  often  leads  us  to  be  lazily  satisfied  with 
uttering  pleasant  commonplaces  over  the  grave 
of  a  man  whose  influence  has  been  evil,  or  who 
has  wilfully  neglected  opportunities  to  do  good. 
In  literature,  a  similar  feeling  often  prompts  us 
to  repeat  complacently  the  praise  which  con- 
temporaries may  have  bestowed  upon  a  writer 
not  wholly  worthy  of  the  manifold  laudations  he 
has  received.  As  Dryden  put  it  aptly  in  one  of 
his  epilogs, 

Fame  then  was  cheap,  and  the  first-comers  sped; 
And  they  have  kept  it  since  by  being  dead. 

Sometimes  a  writer  may  win  an  undue  pro- 
portion of  his  fame  merely  by  outliving  all  his 
rivals.  Keats  and  Shelley,  Musset  and  Poe, 
were  all  cut  off  untimely  in  their  youth,  whereas 
Voltaire  and  Goethe,  Victor  Hugo  and  Tennyson, 
were  allowed  more  than  the  full  plenitude  of 
threescore  years  and  ten.  Perhaps  some  few  of 
the  laurels  with  which  these  octogenarians  were 
97 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

crowned  before  death  at  last  overtook  them  may 
have  been  bestowed  as  much  out  of  reverence 
for  their  venerable  estate  as  out  of  regard  for 
their  indisputable  gifts.  In  Franklin's  phrase, 
they  obtruded  themselves  into  the  presence  of 
posterity;  and  posterity  was  glad  to  pay  them 
homage,  partly  because  of  sheer  survivorship. 
They  had  each  of  them  won  the  prize  in  the  ton- 
tine of  fame, — a  prize  denied  to  Shakspere,  to 
Moliere,  and  to  Balzac,  who  were  able  to  attain 
only  to  a  little  more  than  a  half-century  of  life. 

Voltaire  once  laid  down  the  rule  that  if  the 
devil  should  help  us  out  of  a  hole,  we  are  bound 
to  say  a  good  word  for  his  horns.  And  if  the 
Devil's  Advocate  shall  aid  us  to  a  clearer  percep- 
tion of  the  emptiness  of  certain  inflated  reputa- 
tions, common  decency  ought  to  make  us  refrain 
from  damning  his  eyes.  Indeed,  if  we  discover 
the  activity  of  the  Devil's  Advocate  to  be  benefi- 
cent, we  may,  if  we  prefer,  credit  his  good  deed  to 
a  good  motive,  and  we  may  refuse  to  believe  that 
it  was  prompted  by  the  Spirit  of  Evil.  Perhaps 
we  should  go  further  and  suggest  that  any  search 
for  his  motive  may  be  unnecessary,  since  his 
actions,  like  those  of  any  other  useful  function- 
ary, are  to  be  judged  properly  by  their  results 
only. 

That  the  Devil's  Advocate  is  a  useful  function- 
ary can  be  denied  by  no  one  who  recognizes  the 
98 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

danger  to  the  cause  of  art  when  the  practitioner 
of  any  craft  is  wantonly  overpraised  for  what  he 
actually  did  or  wilfully  belauded  for  what  he 
failed  to  accomplish.  For  example,  the  unmixed 
eulogy  of  Shakspere,  such  as  we  find  in  Swin- 
burne's exuberant  peans,  is  positively  harmful, 
since  it  tends  to  obscure  the  real  merits  of  the 
victim  of  this  dithyrambic  rhapsody.  By  refus- 
ing to  admit  any  possible  deficiency  in  Shakspere, 
we  deny  ourselves  the  privilege  and  the  pleasure 
of  discerning  the  solid  basis  of  his  real  superior- 
ity. Great  as  a  poet,  as  a  psychologist,  as  a 
philosophic  commentator  on  life,  Shakspere  is 
great  as  a  playwright  only  on  occasion, — that  is  to 
say,  in  less  than  half  of  his  dramas.  In  the  other 
half  he  seems  to  have  been  satisfied  to  meet  only 
the  lax  demands  of  the  Elizabethan  audiences. 
For  us  to  be  unwilling  to  confess  the  haphazard 
conduct  of  the  sprawling  plot  in  'Cymbeline' 
and  in  the  'Winter's  Tale'  is  not  only  to  sur- 
render ignominiously  the  right  of  criticism,  it  is 
also  to  debar  ourselves  from  perceiving  the 
masterly  structure  of  'Othello'  and  'Hamlet.5 
It  is  a  fact  that  Shakspere  could  be  a  playwright 
of  surpassing  skill  whenever  he  chose  to  take 
the  trouble  to  shape  his  material  to  best  advan- 
tage; and  it  is  also  a  fact  that  he  did  not  always 
take  this  trouble.  We  cannot  refuse  our  grati- 
tude to  the  Devil's  Advocate,  if  his  protest 

99 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

against  the  slovenly  plot-making  of  'Cymbeline' 
opens  our  eyes  to  see  more  clearly  the  marvel- 
ous dexterity  of  the  dramaturgy  which  Shak- 
spere  displayed  in  'Othello.' 

But  this  is  only  a  part  of  the  duty  of  the  Devil's 
Advocate,  this  more  exact  estimating  of  the 
specific  qualities  which  justify  the  fame  of  the 
great  writers.  Another  part  of  his  obligation  is 
to  press  the  embarrassing  question  whether  cer- 
tain writers  are  in  very  truth  entitled  to  be  termed 
great.  There  are  not  a  few  reputations  which 
this  generation  has  inherited  from  the  generations 
that  went  before,  and  which  we  must  needs  ex- 
amine for  ourselves  to  make  sure  that  the  title- 
deeds  are  all  that  they  pretend  to  be.  And 
altho  it  will  doubtless  annoy  many  who  are  con- 
tent to  admire  by  tradition,  the  suggestion  may 
be  riskt  that  there  is  no  task  ready  to  the  hand 
of  the  Devil's  Advocate  in  these  opening  years 
of  this  twentieth  century  more  pressing  than  an 
insistence  upon  the  desirability  of  a  fresh  con- 
sideration of  the  claims  of  John  Ruskin,  of 
Thomas  Carlyle,  and  of  Samuel  Johnson. 

The  position  of  these  writers  is  almost  un- 
challenged; they  continue  to  be  showered  with 
superabundant  praise;  their  works  reappear  in 
frequent  editions;  they  profit  unceasingly  by 
past  praise;  and  their  admirers  would  be  sur- 
prized if  their  right  to  exalted  celebrity  should  be 

100 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

sharply  challenged.  That  they  have  attained  to 
the  fame  which  they  now  enjoy  is  proof  of  their 
possession  of  undeniable  qualities.  For  every 
reputation  there  must  have  been  good  reasons, 
of  course;  but  the  question  for  us  is  whether 
these  reasons  are  valid  for  us  now  and  today. 
There  were  reasons  enough  for  the  reputation  of 
Pope  in  his  time,  and  yet  his  fame  is  now  sadly 
shrunken.  Are  the  foundations  for  the  reputa- 
tion of  Johnson,  of  Carlyle,  and  of  Ruskin  really 
as  solidly  buttrest  as  the  foundation  of  the 
reputation  of  Pope?  The  actual  merits  of  Pope, 
his  wit,  his  verbal  adroitness,  his  consummate 
craftsmanship  as  a  versifier  according  to  the  code 
accepted  in  his  own  day, — these  are  all  ac- 
knowledged now,  perhaps  more  adequately  than 
ever  before;  and  yet  his  glory  is  diminisht. 
Have  we  any  cause  to  suspect  that  the  glory  of 
Carlyle  and  of  Ruskin  and  of  Johnson  will  also 
be  dimmed,  even  if  they  continue  to  command 
respect  for  humbler  qualities  than  those  with 
which  they  are  now  carelessly  credited? 

Certainly  the  Devil's  Advocate  will  have  his 
work  laid  out  for  him  when  he  undertakes  to 
dispute  Ruskin's  right  to  the  reputation  that  is 
now  allotted  to  him.  That  Ruskin  was  a  great 
writer,  in  the  narrower  meaning  of  the  word,  is 
indisputable.  He  was  a  master-rhetorician.  We 
may  relish  his  style  or  we  may  detest  it;  but 

101 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

there  is  no  denying  that  he  had  a  style.  He 
possest  what  Shakspere  called  "an  exchequer 
of  words."  Stevenson  credited  him  with  a 
' '  large  declamatory  and  controversial  eloquence. " 
But  John  La  Rarge  pointed  out  that  his  "use  of 
phraseology  that  continually  recalls  to  us  the 
forms  of  the  Bible  or  of  the  sermon-writer" 
gradually  hypnotizes  us  until  "we  begin  to  be- 
lieve that  beneath  such  words  there  must  be 
some  graver  message  than  could  be  contained  in 
forms  of  ordinary  speech:  indeed,  the  use  of 
clear,  ordinary  speech  would  have  made  many 
of  his  appeals  collapse  in  ridicule."  Mr.  Henry 
James  has  made  it  plain  that  Ruskin's  abundant 
writing  about  art  fails  totally  to  bring  out  the 
fact  that  "Art,  after  all,  is  made  for  us,  and  not 
we  for  art";  and  the  same  writer  goes  on  to  say 
that  as  to  Ruskin's  world  of  art  "being  a  place 
where  we  may  take  life  easily,  wo  to  the  luck- 
less mortal  who  enters  it  with  any  such  dispo- 
sition; instead  of  a  garden  of  delight,  he  finds  a 
sort  of  assize-court  in  perpetual  session." 

It  may  be  claimed  that  even  if  Ruskin's  theor- 
ies of  pictorial  art  are  now  as  discredited  as 
Pope's  theories  of  poetry,  he  is  still  an  inspiring 
critic  in  the  supreme  art  of  the  conduct  of  life, 
since  he  contributed  powerfully  to  the  solution 
of  the  pressing  problems  of  society.  But  here 
the  Devil's  Advocate  would  summon  other  wit- 
102 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

nesses,  as  competent  in  this  field  as  La  Farge 
and  Mr.  James  in  the  field  of  pictorial  art.  Lord 
Avebury,  for  one,  has  asserted  that  while  Rus- 
kin's  writings  on  these  subjects  "are  admirable 
as  guides  to  conduct  and  thoroly  Christian  in 
spirit,"  to  treat  them  "as  principles  of  political 
economy  is  to  confuse  two  totally  different 
things,"  since  "tables  of  weights  and  measures 
are  not  condemned  as  cold  and  heartless  because 
some  people  have  not  enough  to  eat;  and  to 
alter  the  size  of  the  bushel  will  not  increase  the 
supply  of  food."  And  it  is  a  fact,  whatever  its 
significance,  that  Ruskin's  contributions  to  eco- 
nomic theory  have  been  brusht  aside  by  nearly 
all  serious  students  of  social  conditions  with  the 
same  contempt  displayed  by  painters  and  archi- 
tects toward  his  contributions  to  the  theory  of 
the  fine  arts.  It  is  perhaps  not  too  much  to  say 
that  those  who  are  most  intimately  acquainted 
with  these  subjects  hold  that  altho  Ruskin  could 
talk  beautifully,  he  did  not  know  what  he  was 
talking  about. 

Lord  Avebury,  it  will  be  noted,  declared  that 
Ruskin's  writings  were  thoroly  Christian  in 
spirit.  And  here  is  where  the  last  stand  is  likely 
to  be  made  by  the  ardent  admirers  of  Ruskin. 
For  example,  Charles  Eliot  Norton  asserted  his 
conviction  that  "  no  other  master  of  literature  in 
our  time  endeavored  more  earnestly  and  steadily 
103 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

to  set  forth,  for  the  help  of  those  he  addrest, 
whatsoever  things  are  true,  honest,  just,  pure, 
lovely,  and  of  good  report."  When  we  read 
praise  like  this  we  can  hardly  believe  our  eyes, 
since  Ruskin,  in  a  very  large  part  of  his  writings, 
was  notoriously  querulous  and  scornful.  It  is 
difficult  to  discover  the  Christian  virtue  of  hu- 
mility in  a  writer  who  degenerated  into  little 
better  than  a  common  scold.  The  Devil's  Ad- 
vocate will  have  no  difficulty  in  showing  that 
arrogance  was  as  characteristic  of  Ruskin's  atti- 
tude as  shrieking  was  characteristic  of  his  utter- 
ance. With  all  his  devotion  to  truth  (as  his 
own  narrow  vision  revealed  this  to  him),  Rus- 
kin was  wholly  devoid  of  tolerance;  and,  as 
Lord  Morley  has  told  us,  ''tolerance  means  rever- 
ence for  all  the  possibilities  of  Truth;  it  means 
acknowledgment  that  she  dwells  in  divers  man- 
sions and  wears  vesture  of  many  colors,  and 
speaks  strange  tongues  ...  it  means  the 
charity  that  is  greater  even  than  faith  and  hope." 
Can  even  the  most  devoted  admirer  of  Ruskin 
claim  that  he  was  dowered  with  the  essential 
Christian  virtues  of  faith  and  hope  and  charity? 

After  all,  it  is  not  too  much  to  insist  that  a 
good  Christian  ought  to  have  good  manners. 
He  ought  to  possess  his  soul  in  patience;  to  con- 
trol his  temper;  and  to  show  at  least  a  little 
loving-kindness.  He  ought  to  be  a  gentleman, 
104 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

in  the  best  meaning  of  that  abused  word, — a 
word  frequent  in  Ruskin's  mouth,  altho  the 
qualities  it  denotes  were  as  frequently  absent 
from  his  works.  And  the  Devil's  Advocate 
could  read  to  the  court  many  a  passage  from 
Ruskin's  writings  which  would  prove  that  he 
had  very  bad  manners,  and  that  they  were 
rooted  in  a  belligerent  self-esteem  and  in  an 
offensive  disregard  for  the  feelings  of  others. 
No  doubt,  the  Devil's  Advocate  might  feel  it  to 
be  his  duty  also  to  offer  in  evidence  those  other 
pages  in  which  Ruskin  reveled  in  violent  eccen- 
tricities of  thought,  and  in  which  he  compla- 
cently displayed  his  assumption  of  special  know- 
ledge in  departments  of  learning  wherein  he  was 
profoundly  ignorant.  Of  course,  the  counsel  for 
the  defense  would  then  read  to  the  court  ex- 
tracts in  which  the  nobler  side  of  Ruskin's  nature 
revealed  itself,  and  in  which  the  exuberant 
rhetoric  was  sustained  by  clear  thinking  and  by 
kindly  feeling. 

When  the  case  against  Ruskin  has  been  argued 
the  Devil's  Advocate  will  turn  to  the  case  against 
Carlyle;  and  he  will  be  able  to  bring  forward 
a  host  of  witnesses  to  prove  that  Carlyle  was 
curiously  like  Ruskin  in  his  bad  manners,  in  his 
intolerant  contempt,  and  in  his  overweening 
self-conceit.  The  most  impressive  of  these  wit- 
nesses will  be  Carlyle  himself,  who  shrank  from 
105 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

no  self-revelation  of  his  selfish  disregard  for  his 
fellow  human  beings.  Carlyle  was  unforgiv- 
ably contemptible  in  his  reference  to  Charles 
Lamb,  a  far  nobler  character  than  himself.  He 
defended  Eyre,  the  brutal  governor;  and  he 
sneered  at  Howard,  the  prison-reformer.  He 
had  the  infelicity  of  being  wrong-headed  on  the 
wrong  side;  he  saw  no  harm  in  slavery;  and  he 
boasted  that  he  longed  "to  get  his  knife  into 
George  Washington."  He  became  bitterly  jeal- 
ous of  Emerson,  to  whom  he  was  under  obliga- 
tion for  money  at  a  time  when  money  was  most 
welcome  to  him.  There  was  envious  conde- 
scension in  his  remark  to  Colonel  Higginson  that 
Emerson  thought  "everybody  in  the  world  as 
good  as  himself."  Certainly  Carlyle  made  sure 
that  nobody  could  ever  truthfully  make  a  similar 
remark  about  him.  If  the  Devil's  Advocate  has 
the  courage  of  his  convictions,  he  may  be  moved 
to  insinuate  that  envy  is  the  keynote  of  Carlyle's 
character,  the  mean  envy  of  a  peasant  conscious 
of  great  gifts  yet  uneasy  in  the  company  of  those 
better  graced  than  himself.  This  envy  prompted 
his  self-consciousness  to  self-display,  in  total  dis- 
regard of  the  society  in  which  he  found  himself. 
Galton  met  him  at  the  Ashburtons'  and  thought 
him  "the  greatest  bore  that  a  house  could  toler- 
ate," "raving  against  degeneracy  without  any 
facts  in  justification,  and  contributing  nothing  to 
1 06 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

the  information  or  pleasure  of  the  company." 
In  his  writings  Carlyle  revealed  the  same  failings 
as  in  his  conduct.  He  treated  the  statesmen  of 
the  French  Revolution  with  an  insular  insolence 
which  is  as  unpleasant  as  it  is  unjustifiable.  He 
was  ill  at  ease  in  his  century,  since  he  was 
wholly  out  of  sympathy  with  its  two  most  salient 
characteristics — the  democratic  movement  and 
the  scientific  spirit.  His  work  was  essentially 
negative  and  destructive;  a  man  might  learn 
from  him  what  to  hate,  but  never  what  to  love. 
His  political  philosophy,  with  its  reliance  upon 
an  inspired  dictator,  a  man  on  horseback,  is  a 
blatant  anachronism  discredited  long  before  Car- 
lyle was  born.  And  he  was  absurdly  inconsis- 
tent in  his  own  practice;  as  it  has  been  put  pith- 
ily, "he  preacht  the  doctrine  of  silence  in  forty 
volumes."  He  pretended  to  despise  mere  words, 
yet  he  was  himself  essentially  a  phrase-maker. 

The  counsel  for  the  defense  will  dwell  upon 
his  honest  hard  work  and  upon  his  loyal  labor. 
He  may  call  to  the  stand  a  fellow-historian, 
Lecky,  who  once  made  bold  to  assert  that  "in 
all  that  vast  mass  of  literature  which  Carlyle  has 
bequeathed  to  us  there  is  no  scampt  work,  and 
every  competent  judge  has  recognized  the  untir- 
ing and  conscientious  accuracy  with  which  he 
has  verified  and  sifted  the  minutest  fact."  But 
the  Devil's  Advocate  will  promptly  put  on  the 
107 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

stand  one  of  these  competent  judges,  Professor 
Morse  Stephens,  who  has  recorded  how  Carlyle 
wilfully  neglected  the  enormous  collection  of 
French  Revolutionary  pamphlets  in  the  British 
Museum.  These  documents  are  absolutely  es- 
sential to  a  full  understanding  of  those  troublous 
times;  but  Carlyle  refused  to  profit  by  them 
simply  because  the  authorities  of  the  library  de- 
clined to  set  aside  a  special  room  for  him  to 
consult  them  in.  Perhaps  it  is  because  he  wan- 
tonly ignored  these  sources  of  information  that 
Carlyle's  'French  Revolution,'  with  all  its  gleams 
of  genius  and  its  flashes  of  insight,  is  as  fantastic 
as  it  is — a  nightmare  of  history. 

His  style  is  as  individual  as  it  is  indefensible. 
It  was  deliberately  adapted  for  effect;  and  if  it  is 
judged  by  its  results,  it  has  had  pernicious  con- 
sequences, misleading  many  who  lackt  Carlyle's 
great  powers  into  a  morass  of  violent  verbiage. 
There  is  significance  in  the  remark  of  Landor 
that  Carlyle  made  a  few  ideas  go  further  than 
any  one  had  ever  done  before;  and  there  is 
special  shrewdness  in  the  suggestion  which 
Landor  added:  "If  you  see  a  heap  of  books 
thrown  on  the  floor,  they  look  ten  times  as 
many  as  when  orderly  on  the  shelf." 

When  he  undertakes  the  case  of  Samuel  John- 
son the  Devil's  Advocate  will  have  the  easiest 
task  of  the  three.  The  works  of  Ruskin  and 
1 08 


THE  DEVIL  S  ADVOCATE 

of  Carlyle  survive  and  are  still  abundantly  read, 
whereas  the  works  of  Johnson,  even  if  reprinted 
from  time  to  time,  remain  almost  unread  except 
by  special  students.  The  general  public  may 
know  Johnson  himself,  but  not  from  his  own 
writings.  He  survives  now  only  by  what  an- 
other man  wrote  about  him.  Without  Boswell, 
Johnson's  fame  would  have  shriveled  long  ago. 
His  authority  as  a  critic — and  it  is  only  as  a 
critic  that  he  has  any  claim  to  authority — is  now 
thoroly  discredited.  Nearly  a  century  ago, 
Hazlitt  declared  that  "it  is  the  establisht  rule  at 
present  to  speak  highly  of  the  doctor's  authority 
and  to  dissent  from  almost  every  one  of  his  criti- 
cal decisions."  How  inept  these  decisions  were 
may  be  judged  from  his  remark  to  Miss  Seward 
that  he  would  "hang  a  dog  that  would  read 
'Lycidas'  twice."  And  when  she  askt  what 
would  become  of  her,  who  read  and  reread 
Milton's  lovely  lyric  with  a  delight  "which 
grows  by  what  it  feeds  on,"  he  returned  the 
surly  answer  that  she  might  die  "  in  a  surfeit  of 
bad  taste."  And  his  critical  decisions  on  Shak- 
spere  are  often  only  a  little  less  absurd  than  his 
judgments  on  Milton. 

In  his  conversation,  as  in  his  writing,  John- 
son delighted  in  displaying  the  same  trampling 
arrogance  that  we  discover  also  in  Ruskin  and 
in  Carlyle.     He  boasted  that  "to  treat  your  op- 
109 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

ponent  with  respect  is  to  give  him  an  advantage 
to  which  he  is  not  entitled"; — and  perhaps  he 
never  made  any  remark  more  characteristic  of 
his  underbred  narrow-mindedness.  This  boast 
he  made  good  not  only  in  his  conversation  but 
also  in  his  writing,  both  literary  and  political. 
It  was  exemplified  in  'Taxation  no  Tyranny,' 
the  partizan  pamphlet  he  composed  in  return 
for  the  pension  bestowed  on  him  by  George 
III,  a  king  after  his  own  heart.  His  political 
principles  were  as  arbitrary  as  his  literary  opin- 
ions; and  today  they  are  equally  discredited. 
In  his  own  time  Gibbon  saw  thru  him  and  de- 
scribed him  (in  one  of  the  notes  of  the  'Decline 
and  Fall')  as  having  "a  bigoted  tho  vigorous 
mind,  greedy  of  every  pretence  to  hate  and  per- 
secute those  who  dissent  from  his  creed." 

His  style,  which  was  once  widely  admired, 
long  exerted  an  evil  influence  upon  English 
literature.  It  was  as  artificial  and  as  demoralizing 
as  the  style  of  Carlyle.  Only  a  little  while  after 
Johnson  died,  Coleridge  had  asserted  that  "the 
antithesis  of  Johnson  is  rarely  more  than  verbal." 
It  was  a  pretentious  and  inflated  kind  of  writ- 
ing, which  had  at  least  the  merit  of  being  in 
consonance  with  the  character  of  the  writer. 
Never  was  this  style  displayed  to  less  advantage 
than  in  the  'Idler'  and  the  'Rambler,'  since  the 
essay  (as  Steele  and  Addison  had  perfected  it) 
no 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

called  for  lightness  and  swiftness,  unflagging 
variety  and  unforced  ease, — qualities  Johnson 
was  devoid  of,  even  if  he  did  not  consciously 
eschew  them. 

That  Johnson  had  common  sense  of  a  heavy- 
handed  sort,  that  he  had  a  piercing  but  limited 
insight  into  human  nature,  that  he  showed  a 
sturdy  manliness  under  misfortune, — these  things 
the  Devil's  Advocate  will  acknowledge  un- 
grudgingly. But  the  counsel  for  the  defense 
will  have  to  admit  also  a  host  of  deficiencies  of 
character, — that  Johnson  was  on  occasion  harsh 
and  brutal,  that  he  used  his  strength  often  to 
crush  down  the  weak,  that  he  was  a  wretched 
glutton,  and  that  he  was  pitiably  superstitious. 
"We  must  measure  the  glory  of  authors  by  the 
number  of  those  who  benefit  by  their  works," 
said  Nisard.  If  we  apply  this  measurement  to 
Johnson,  his  glory  is  seen  to  be  miserably  di- 
minisht,  since  an  author's  works  can  benefit  only 
those  by  whom  they  are  read. 

But  the  Devil's  Advocate  can  be  trusted  to 
handle  his  own  case  in  due  season.  He  will 
speak  for  himself,  and  he  will  call  many  wit- 
nesses ;  some  of  those  he  will  put  upon  the  stand 
may  break  down  under  cross-examination,  and 
it  may  be  that  he  himself  will  overindulge  in  the 
privilege  of  special  pleading.  Yet,  after  all,  he 
may  turn  out  to  be  like  his  master — not  so  black 
in 


THE  DEVIL'S  ADVOCATE 

as  he  is  painted.  The  sooner  he  is  able  to  pre- 
pare his  case  against  those  three  candidates  for 
literary  beatification  the  better,  let  the  result  of 
the  several  trials  be  what  it  may.  We  cannot 
find  out  too  soon  whether  or  not  Johnson  and 
Carlyle  and  Ruskin  are  truly  entitled  to  be  lifted 
aloft  to  the  side  of  Lessing,  for  whom  Goethe 
and  Schiller  once  composed  in  collaboration  an 
epigram-epitaph: 

Living  we  honored  thee,  loved  thee;  we  set  thee  among 

the  immortals; 
Dead,  and  thy  spirit  still  reigns  o'er  the  spirits  of  men. 

(1910-) 


112 


LITERARY  CRITICISM  AND 
BOOK-REVIEWING 


VI 

LITERARY  CRITICISM  AND 
BOOK-REVIEWING 

MANKIND  has  a  marvelous  facility  for  self- 
repetition,  as  tho  it  was  resolved  to  keep  on 
proving  that  to-morrow  is  like  unto  yesterday. 
Even  history  is  prone  to  plagiarize  from  itself  at 
whatever  interval  of  time;  and  many  an  Ameri- 
can, reading  about  General  Buller's  obstinate 
blundering  on  the  Tugela,  could  not  help  feeling 
that  Braddock  had  been  defeated  once  again.  The 
world  moves,  of  course;  and  yet  we  go  on  say- 
ing ditto  to  our  grandfathers  in  the  placid  belief 
that  we  are  declaring  new  truths. 

Just  at  the  beginning  of  the  new  century  the 
new  truth  which  certain  strenuous  writers  are 
shrilly  declaring  is  that  literature  is  suffering  from 
a  lack  of  criticism,  that  there  are  now  none  to 
uphold  the  final  standards  of  literary  art  and  to 
apply  them  inexorably,  and  that,  therefore,  the 
republic  of  letters  is  in  a  parlous  state,  with  in- 
competent mediocrity  claiming  all  the  rewards  of 
merit  and  usurping  all  the  places  of  honor.  One 
of  these  robust  protestants  against  the  prevailing 


LITERARY    CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

laxity  of  criticism,  the  British  author  of  a  chance 
collection  of  '  Ephemera  Critica,'  laments  that 
belles-lettres  are  sinking  deeper  and  deeper  into 
degradation;  and  two  American  reviewers  are  in 
painful  accord  with  him,  the  first  asserting  that 
"one  grows  weary,  in  these  days,  of  harping 
persistingly  upon  the  melancholy  fact  that  criti- 
cism in  the  Anglo-Saxon  world  has  become  al- 
most extinct  and  that  what  the  public  accepts  as 
criticism  is  almost  anything  but  that,"  while  the 
second  complacently  confesses  that  "the  degra- 
dation of  literature  is  one  of  the  facts  of  the 
present  day  impossible  to  ignore."  And  all  three 
of  these  writers  unite  in  crying  aloud  for  a  criti- 
cism which  shall  scourge  and  scorch  the  feeble 
folk  now  enjoying  the  favor  of  the  public  and 
which  shall  drive  the  money-changers  from  out 
the  temple  of  art. 

This  cry  not  only  finds  a  prompt  response  in 
that  gorilla-delight  at  the  prospect  of  seeing 
somebody  else  suffer  which  still  works  in  not  a 
few  of  us,  but  it  also  awakens  an  echo  in  the 
breasts  of  many  milder  lovers  of  literature, 
justly  annoyed  by  the  prevalence  of  flagrant  puf- 
fery and  by  the  silly  exaltation  of  the  novels  of 
the  hour  which  are  ever  achieving  a  vogue  sadly 
out  of  proportion  to  their  actual  value.  No  doubt, 
it  must  be  very  irritating  to  those  whose  sense 
of  proportion  is  keener  than  their  sense-of-humor, 
116 


LITERARY    CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

to  read  in  the  hasty  reviews  that  fill  the  daily  and 
the  weekly  papers  that  this  or  that  callow  story- 
teller has  really  rivaled  Thackeray  or  Hawthorne, 
and  that  one  of  the  minor  choir  of  latter-day 
songsters  combines  in  his  verses  the  luscious 
beauty  of  Keats  with  the  penetrative  imagination 
of  Wordsworth. 

But,  however  understandable  it  is  that  men 
should  be  provoked  to  wrath  by  absurdities 
like  these,  there  is  no  basis  for  the  belief  that  the 
present  conditions,  lamentable  as  they  may  seem 
to  some,  are  in  any  way  new.  It  is  more  than 
fifty  years  since  Poe  died ;  and  Poe  was  as  ve- 
hement as  any  of  the  protestants  of  to-day  in  de- 
claring the  decadence  of  contemporary  literature 
and  in  asserting  the  necessity  for  a  criticism 
which  should  be  as  rigorous  as  it  was  vigorous. 
And  it  is  more  than  seventy  years  since  Macaulay 
gave  utterance  to  the  same  opinions,  asserting 
that  "however  contemptible  a  poem  or  a  novel 
may  be,  there  is  not  the  least  difficulty  in  pro- 
curing favorable  notices  of  it  from  all  sorts  of 
publications,  daily,  weekly  or  monthly."  Ma- 
caulay went  on  to  maintain  that  the  influence  of 
puffery  was  most  pernicious,  since  "it  is  no 
small  evil  that  the  avenues  of  fame  should  be 
blocked  up  by  a  swarm  of  noisy,  pushing,  elbow- 
ing pretenders,  who,  tho  they  will  not  be  able  to 
make  good  their  own  entrance,  hinder  in  the 
117 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

meantime  those  who  have  a  right  to  enter."  Now, 
even  if  the  present  state  of  affairs  is  most  de- 
plorable, there  is  at  least  consolation  in  the 
knowledge  that  we  have  not  fallen  from  the  high 
estate  of  our  ancestors.  Indeed,  we  may  even 
take  comfort  in  the  thought  that,  if  the  same 
puffery  existed  in  Poe's  time  and  in  Macaulay's, 
perhaps  it  may  not  be  so  fatal  to  literature  as 
those  two  incisive  writers  asserted.  We  may 
perhaps  go  further  and  surmise  that  if  literature 
really  flourished  fifty  years  ago  and  seventy 
years  ago,  as  we  know  that  it  did,  altho  the  book- 
reviewers  were  doing  their  duty  no  better  then 
than  they  are  doing  it  now,  perhaps  the  vigorous 
and  rigorous  criticism  of  the  sort  that  Macaulay 
and  Poe  preached — and  that  they  both  on  occa- 
sion practised— is  not  quite  so  necessary  as  they 
declared  it  to  be. 

Behind  the  somewhat  exacerbated  protest  of 
Macaulay  and  Poe  and  of  the  strenuous  writers 
of  our  own  day  who  voice  the  same  dissatisfac- 
tion, there  lies  a  threefold  assumption:— first, 
that  it  is  the  chief  duty  of  the  critic  to  tear  the 
mask  from  impostors  and  to  rid  the  earth  of  the 
incompetent;  second,  that  the  critics  of  the  past 
accepted  this  obligation  and  were  successful  in  its 
accomplishment ;  and  third,  that  there  is  today  at 
the  beginning  of  the  twentieth  century  a  special 
need  for  this  corrective  criticism.  Yet  these 
118 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

three  assumptions  are  assumptions  only;  not  one 
of  them  is  borne  out  by  the  history  of  literature. 
But,  altho  unsupported  by  the  facts,  they  are  so 
plausible  that  they  are  likely  to  mislead  and  to 
create  a  misunderstanding  as  to  the  true  function 
of  criticism. 

It  may  be  an  obligation  upon  the  critic  of 
science  to  tear  the  mask  from  off  the  impostor; 
but  this  can  never  be  a  chief  duty  for  the  critic  of 
art.  In  so  far  as  literature  touches  science— in 
biography,  for  example,  and  in  the  other  depart- 
ments of  history— the  utmost  exactness  of  state- 
ment must  be  insisted  upon.  But  in  so  far  as 
literature  is  an  art,  in  pure  belles-lettres,  in  poetry, 
in  the  drama,  in  prose-fiction,  there  are  no 
standards  of  scientific  exactness  to  be  applied 
with  scientific  rigidity.  When  the  critic  is  unfor- 
tunately seized  with  the  belief  that  there  are  such 
standards  and  that  these  standards  are  in  his  pos- 
session, to  be  applied  at  will,  the  result  is  Jeffrey's 
famous  condemnation  of  Wordsworth  and  the 
infamous  assault  on  Keats— two  instances  with- 
out much  encouragement  for  the  critic  who  may 
feel  moved  to  volunteer  for  police  work. 

Nor  is  there  any  better  warrant  for  the  second 
of  these  three  assumptions— that  the  critics  of  the 
past  accepted  the  obligation  of  taking  pretenders 
to  the  police-station,  while  the  critics  of  the  pres- 
ent are  derelict  to  their  duty,  preferring  rather  to 
119 


LITERARY    CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

close  their  eyes  when  they  perceive  incompetent 
poets  and  unworthy  romancers  picking  the 
pockets  of  the  unsuspecting  public.  It  is  true 
that  certain  of  the  self-styled  critics  of  the  past 
devoted  themselves  to  the  exposure  of  literary 
malefactors,  but  the  result  of  their  labors  was 
often  only  a  pitiful  self-exposure.  Jeffrey,  of  the 
Edinburgh,  and  Wilson,  ofB/ackwood's,  abounded 
in  scathing  contempt  of  the  books  they  did  not 
like.  When  they  were  wrong,  as  not  infrequently 
happened,  they  merely  made  themselves  laugh- 
ing-stocks for  all  who  have  come  after;  and 
when  they  were  right,  as  might  be  the  case  now 
and  again,  they  had  plainly  wasted  their  time, 
since  they  had  done  no  more  than  kill  what  had 
no  real  vitality. 

When  we  note  that  no  one  of  the  leading 
critics  of  the  nineteenth  century— Sainte-Beuve, 
Arnold  or  Lowell— cared  keenly  for  the  discus- 
sion of  contemporary  literature,  we  are  led  to 
remark  that  there  is  a  necessary  distinction  to  be 
made  between  criticism,  as  they  practised  it,  and 
mere  book-reviewing.  Criticism,  in  their  hands 
and  in  the  hands  of  those  who  follow  them,  is  a 
department  of  literature,  while  book-reviewing  is 
a  branch  of  journalism.  To  "  get  the  best  "  is  the 
aim  of  literature,  while  .the  object  of  journalism 
is  rather  to  "get  the  news."  The  critic,  con- 
cerning himself  especially  with  what  is  most 

120 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

worthy  of  his  inquiry,  is  led  most  often  to  dis- 
cuss the  picked  works  bequeathed  to  us  by  the 
past,  while  the  book-reviewer,  writing  for  a  peri- 
odical, has  perforce  to  deal  with  the  average 
product  of  the  present.  Criticism  is  the  art  of 
"seeing  the  object  as  in  itself  it  really  is,"  so 
Matthew  Arnold  told  us;  and  it  "obeys  an  in- 
stinct prompting  it  to  try  to  know  the  best  that 
is  known  and  thought  in  the  world."  Book- 
reviewing,  however  useful  it  may  be,  has  a  far 
humbler  function ;  it  may  be  defined  as  the  art  of 
informing  readers  just  what  the  latest  volume  is, 
in  kind,  in  character,  and  in  quality. 

Criticism  can,  if  it  so  choose,  deal  only  with 
the  permanent  past,  while  book-reviewing  has  no 
option;  it  must  consider  the  fleeting  present. 
Book-reviewing  has  for  its  staple  topic  the  con- 
temporary—which is  very  likely  to  be  little  better 
than  temporary ;  and  it  is,  therefore,  at  liberty  to 
relax  its  requirements  and  to  apply  standards  that 
are  immediate  rather  than  permanent— to  contrast 
one  novelist  of  our  time  with  another  novelist  of 
our  time  rather  than  to  crush  both  of  them  under 
a  comparison  with  the  mighty  masters  of  the 
past.  It  would  be  absurd  for  a  book-reviewer  to 
feel  forced  always  to  condemn  every  new  volume 
of  short-stories  because  the  young  writers  are  ob- 
viously inferior  in  force  and  in  finish  to  Poe  and 
to  Hawthorne,  or  to  banish  every  one  of  the  nov- 
121 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

elists  who  are  seeking  to  set  forth  the  seething 
life  of  the  huge  and  sprawling  metropolis  of 
America  because  these  ardent  novices  lack  not  a 
little  of  the  genius  we  are  all  glad  to  acknowledge 
in  Balzac  and  in  Thackeray. 

It  is  not  with  the  present  condition  of  criticism 
(in  this  narrower  sense  of  the  word)  that  the 
strenuous  writers  are  dissatisfied,  but  rather  with 
the  present  condition  of  book-reviewing  as  re- 
vealed in  our  periodicals,  daily,  weekly,  and 
monthly.  They  proclaim  that  contemporary 
literature  is  languishing  because  the  book-re- 
viewer has  failed  to  do  what  in  him  lies;  and 
they  insist  that  book-reviewing  is  no  longer  what 
it  was  once.  Of  course,  it  is  easy  enough  to 
find  fault  with  the  book-reviewing  of  to-day  as  it 
is  visible  in  the  countless  periodicals  of  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States;  indeed,  there  are 
few  institutions  with  which  it  is  not  easy  to  find 
fault.  Both  in  London  and  in  New  York  book- 
reviewing  is  often  careless;  it  is  often  incompe- 
tent; it  is  frequently  casual  and  hasty;  and  only 
very  rarely  it  is  venal.  It  is  sometimes  careful, 
competent,  thoro  and  disinterested.  It  is  some- 
times merely  the  medium  for  the  selfish  display 
of  what  the  young  writer  is  pleased  to  consider 
as  his  wit.  It  is  sometimes  both  intelligent  and 
conscientious. 

In  the  daily  and  weekly  periodicals  of  England 

122 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

and  America  book-reviewing  is  perhaps  rather  bet- 
ter on  the  whole  than  is  the  reviewing  in  these 
periodicals  of  the  fine  arts,  of  music,  and  of  the 
drama — altho  this  apparent  superiority  is  prob- 
ably due  to  the  greater  inherent  difficulty  of  the 
other  tasks.  Book-reviewing,  again,  is  rather 
better  on  the  whole  at  the  beginning  of  the  twen- 
tieth century  than  it  ever  was  before.  Whoever 
has  considered  the  career  of  Oliver  Goldsmith  can 
recall  the  wretched  condition  of  book-reviewing 
in  England  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, when  it  was  wholly  in  the  control  of  the 
booksellers;  and  whoever  is  familiar  with  the 
correspondence  of  Rufus  Griswold  will  remem- 
ber what  an  extraordinary  state  of  affairs  seems 
to  have  existed  in  the  United  States  in  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  when  an  editor  was 
apparently  considered  churlish  if  he  refused  to 
publish  the  reviews  of  their  books  sent  to  him 
by  the  authors  themselves.  In  fact,  only  those 
who  are  really  ignorant  about  book-reviewing  in 
the  past  would  venture  to  pretend  that  it  was  in 
any  way  superior  to  book-reviewing  in  the  pres- 
ent. 

Probably  this  pretense  is  to  be  ascribed  partly 
to  our  ingrained  belief  that  things  used  to  be  far 
better  than  they  are  now.  We  know  well  enough 
that  this  is  not  true;  but  still  we  often  talk  as  tho 
we  thought  the  world  was  always  running  down 
123 


LITERARY   CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

hill.  The  deficiencies  of  book-reviewing  are 
serious  enough  now;  but  there  never  was  a  time 
when  they  were  any  less  evident.  There  never 
was  a  time  when  book-reviewing  was  all  that  it 
ought  to  be,  or  even  when  its  average  was  high. 
Indeed,  we  may  go  further  and  say  that  there 
never  was  a  periodical,  British  or  American, 
French  or  German,  in  which  the  book-reviewing 
was  always  satisfactory— in  which  it  was  unfail- 
ingly competent,  courteous,  and  disinterested— 
and  in  which  every  article  was  evidently  written 
by  a  gentleman  and  a  scholar.  At  least,  if  there 
is  any  such  periodical  in  existence,  I  should  be 
jlad  to  subscribe  for  it  at  once;  and  if  it  is  no 
longer  in  existence,  I  should  be  glad  to  buy  a 
complete  set.  Moreover,  I  should  be  willing  to 
pay  an  honest  reward  merely  for  the  disclosure  of 
its  name,  since  such  a  periodical  is  what  I  have 
been  seeking  diligently  for  now  many  years. 

In  my  leisurely  youth,  when  I  had  all  the  time 
there  was,  I  bought  a  forty-year  file  of  a 
London  weekly  of  lofty  pretensions  and  of  a 
certain  antiquity,  since  it  has  now  existed  for 
more  than  threescore  years  and  ten ;  and  in  the 
course  of  a  twelvemonth  I  turned  every  page  of 
those  solid  tomes,  not  reading  every  line,  of 
course,  but  not  neglecting  a  single  number.  The 
book-reviewing  was  painfully  uninspired,  with 
little  brilliancy  in  expression  and  with  little  in- 
124 


LITERARY   CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

sight  in  appreciation;  it  was  disfigured  by  a  cer- 
tain smug  complacency  which  I  find  to  be  still  a 
characteristic  of  the  paper  whenever  I  chance 
now  to  glance  at  its  pages.  But  as  I  worked 
thru  this  contemporary  record  of  the  unrolling  of 
British  literature  from  1830  to  1870,  what  was 
most  surprizing  was  the  fact  that  only  infre- 
quently indeed  did  the  book-reviewers  bestow  full 
praise  on  the  successive  publications  which  we 
now  hold  to  be  among  the  chief  glories  of  the 
Victorian  reign,  and  that  the  books  most  lavishly 
eulogized  were  often  those  that  have  now  sunk 
into  oblivion. 

Of  course,  this  surprize  was  a  little  unreason- 
able. The  high  value  of  the  greater  books  of 
this  period  lies  partly  in  their  possession  of  the 
element  of  the  universal  and  the  permanent;  and 
by  the  very  fact  of  their  having  this  element 
these  books  were  so  much  the  less  in  accord 
with  the  prevailing  taste  at  the  moment  of  their 
appearance;  and  the  book-reviewer,  being  a 
journalist,  and,  therefore,  professionally  respon- 
sive to  the  immediately  contemporary,  discovered 
a  closer  conformity  to  this  fleeting  standard  in 
other  books  now  neglected,  largely  because  taste 
has  changed  with  the  passing  of  the  moment. 
Moreover,  there  is  in  the  greater  books  of  any 
era  not  only  this  element  of  universality  and 
permanence,  but  also  an  element  of  individuality 
125 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

often  very  disconcerting  to  those  into  whose 
hands  it  first  comes.  They  do  not  know  quite  what 
to  make  of  it  or  how  to  take  it.  They  can  see  that 
it  fails  to  fit  inside  any  of  the  accepted  formulas, 
and  this  arouses  doubt;  for  the  healthy  conser- 
vatism of  mankind  makes  us  distrust  anything 
that  seems  to  savor  of  overt  originality. 

It  is,  indeed,  a  commonplace  of  criticism  that 
many  a  great  artist  has  had  to  create  the  taste 
he  is  to  satisfy,  and  that  he  has  had  to  educate 
his  public  to  appreciate  him.  The  more  original 
he  is,  the  more  individual  his  expression  of  life, 
the  harder  the  task  before  him.  No  wonder  is 
it,  therefore,  that  what  is  written  in  accord  with 
the  conventions  of  the  present  and  with  the  tra- 
ditions of  the  past  is  more  likely  to  call  forth 
chants  of  praise  from  the  book-reviewer  than 
what  happens  to  be  bristling  with  an  unexpected 
personality.  Even  if  the  book-reviewer  himself 
has  enjoyed  the  reading  of  the  work  in  which  a 
new  thing  is  said  in  a  new  way,  when  he  takes 
up  his  pen  to  comment  upon  it  his  conservatism 
often  restrains  him  from  the  ample  expression  of 
his  pleasure. 

The  third  assumption  of  the  strenuous  writers 
is  that  there  is  a  special  need  now  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  twentieth  century  for  a  fearless  and 
trenchant  criticism  which  shall  relieve  us  some- 
how from  the  immense  increase  in  the  number 
126 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

of  inferior  books  pouring  from  the  presses.  It 
may  be  asserted  at  once  that  this  assumption  has 
no  firmer  foundation  than  the  two  others.  It  is 
true  that  there  are  more  books  published  nowa- 
days than  ever  before,  and  that  a  very  large 
proportion  of  them  are  worthless.  But  then  a 
very  large  proportion  of  the  books  published  in 
any  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century  or  of  the 
eighteenth  century  or  of  the  seventeenth  century 
are  also  worthless.  The  worthy  books  of  these 
centuries  are  still  remembered,  while  the  worth- 
less books  were  soon  forgotten.  It  is  a  well- 
known  fact  that  the  telegraph  poles  seem  closer  to- 
gether the  more  distant  they  are ;  and  so  it  is  also 
with  the  masterpieces  of  literature.  To  suppose 
that  ours  is  the  only  decade  that  has  suffered  by 
the  over-multiplication  of  needless  books  ought 
not  to  be  possible  to  a  scholar  who  knows  the 
history  of  his  own  literature. 

Perhaps  it  is  also  a  little  unscientific  even  to 
allow  that  we  are  suffering  from  an  over-multipli- 
cation of  books.  It  is  possibly  better  to  admit 
that  the  conditions  of  sound  literary  development 
require  that  there  should  be  abundant  and  luxuri- 
ant productivity.  It  augurs  well  for  the  future 
of  our  literature  that  so  many  are  now  striving 
for  self-expression  in  this  medium,  however  an- 
noying it  may  be  to  the  book-reviewer  to  be 
forced  to  consider  an  ever-increasing  number  of 
127 


LITERARY   CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

volumes  piled  high  on  his  table  and  however 
much  it  may  irk  him  to  waste  time  in  commenting 
upon  writers  who  seem  to  him  to  be  beneath 
criticism.  Any  increase  in  the  number  of  books 
points  to  a  probable  increase  in  the  number  of 
good  books— unless,  indeed,  there  has  been  some 
sudden  relaxing  in  the  fiber  of  the  stock  that 
speaks  our  language,  some  strange  loss  of  energy 
in  the  race. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  find  in  the  last  decade 
of  the  past  century  a  very  large  number  of  very 
poor  books,  wholly  unworthy  of  publication, 
useless  for  any  purpose.  But  we  also  find  more 
often  than  ever  before  books  that  attain  a  high 
average  of  substance  and  of  style.  Never  before 
were  the  principles  of  literary  art  so  widely 
understood  or  so  skilfully  applied.  Never  before 
was  technic  more  masterly  or  craftsmanship 
more  accomplished.  Never  before  were  there  so 
many  writers  of  indisputable  talent.  Whether 
or  not  we  have  now  our  full  share  of  writers  of 
genius  is  another  question ;  but  it  is  a  question  to 
which  this  decade  cannot  furnish  an  answer,  nor 
the  next  either.  Genius  can  be  tested  only  by 
the  touchstone  of  time.  Genius  is  for  posterity  to 
proclaim.  The  more  frequent  the  men  of  talent 
among  us  to-day,  the  more  likely  it  is  that  some 
one  of  them  will  be  recognized  as  a  man  of 
genius  to-morrow.  Our  perspective  is  far  too 
128 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

short  for  us  to  gage  the  stature  of  genius.  We 
are  in  the  underbrush  and  we  cannot  make  sure 
which  of  the  tall  trees  is  really  the  loftiest.  On 
his  ability  to  achieve  this  impossibility  many  a 
critic  has  staked  his  reputation — and  lost  it. 

The  aim  of  book-reviewing  is  to  engage  in  dis- 
cussion of  our  contemporaries,  and  this  is  why 
book-reviewing,  which  is  a  department  of  journal- 
ism, must  be  carefully  distinguished  from  criticism, 
which  is  a  department  of  literature.  This  is  why 
also  we  need  not  worry  ourselves  overmuch 
about  the  present  condition  of  book-reviewing, 
since  it  has  not  all  the  importance  which  the 
British  author  of  '  Ephemera  Critica '  has  claimed 
for  it  and  since  it  can  really  have  very  little  influ- 
ence upon  the  future  of  literature.  As  a  fact,  the 
condition  of  book-reviewing  is  not  now  so 
lamentable  as  the  British  author  has  declared,  and 
it  is  not  indeed  really  worse  than  it  was  in 
earlier  years ;  but  it  might  be  very  much  worse 
than  it  is,  and  very  much  worse  than  it  ever  was, 
without  its  having  any  unfortunate  influence 
on  the  development  of  a  single  man  of  genius. 
Indeed,  genius  never  more  surely  reveals  itself  as 
genius  than  in  its  ability  to  withstand  the  pres- 
sure of  contemporary  fashion  and  go  on  doing  its 
own  work  in  its  own  way. 

On  the  author  of  genius  the  book-reviewers 
can  have  little  influence,  fortunate  or  unfortunate; 
129 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

and  even  on  the  author  of  talent  their  influence  is 
at  best  but  indirect.  In  other  words,  the  book- 
reviewers  wholly  misconceive  their  position  when 
they  suppose  themselves  to  have  any  special  duty 
toward  the  author,  since  his  work  must  of  neces- 
sity be  finished  and  out  of  hand  before  they  can 
see  it.  As  we  look  over  the  literary  history  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  we  can  discover  no  single 
instance  of  any  book-reviewer  ever  having  exerted 
any  influence,  favorable  or  unfavorable,  on  any 
author  of  ability,  either  British  or  American.  It 
is  to  the  reader,  and  to  the  reader  only,  that  the 
book-reviewers  are  under  obligation.  It  is  to  the 
reader  that  they  have  to  render  their  reports, 
honestly  declaring  what  manner  of  book  it  may 
be  they  have  before  them,  and  devoting  them- 
selves wholly  to  such  explanation  and  discussion 
as  will  interest  and  instruct  the  reader.  They 
need  take  no  thought  whatever  of  the  author, 
whose  merits  and  demerits  they  are  to  investigate 
and  declare,  not  for  his  sake— for  it  is  then  too 
late  for  him  to  profit  by  any  advice  of  theirs— but 
for  the  sake  of  the  reader.  One  evidence  of  the 
improvement  of  this  branch  of  journalism  is  to 
be  seen  in  the  gradual  disappearance  of  the  old- 
school  book-reviewers  whose  attitude  toward  an 
author  was  often  that  of  a  querulous  pedagog, 
now  giving  him  a  good  mark  and  now  scolding 
him  and  bidding  him  stand  in  the  corner  for  a 
130 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND   BOOK-REVIEWING 

dunce.  The  book-reviewers  of  the  better  class, 
nowadays,  pretend  to  no  responsibility  for  the 
author  and  deal  with  him  quite  impersonally; 
they  are  well  aware  that  any  influence  they  can 
exert  upon  him  must  be  indirect  only  and  thru 
the  pressure  of  public  opinion.  They  recognize 
that  their  duty  is  to  the  reader  only  and  that  their 
sole  means  of  benefiting  literature  is  by  arousing 
in  the  public  at  large  a  distaste  for  the  affected 
and  the  false,  a  disgust  for  the  sham  and  the 
shoddy,  a  regard  and  respect  for  the  sincere  and 
honest  treatment  of  life. 

The  British  author  of  'Ephemera  Critica,'  fol- 
lowed by  the  American  writers  who  have  echoed 
his  plaints,  would  apparently  like  to  have  the 
book-reviewers  resume  the  pedagogic  attitude 
they  have  so  wisely  abandoned.  He  seems  to 
believe  that  they  are  charged  with  grave  respon- 
sibilities, having  the  duty  of  keeping  the  weights 
and  the  measures  and  of  detecting  counterfeit 
currency.  He  tells  us  that  the  critics  of  science 
accept  this  charge  and  acquit  themselves  loyally 
of  this  obligation;  and  he  insists  that  the  same 
burden  should  rest  also  upon  the  critics  of  belles- 
lettres— in  other  words,  upon  the  book-reviewers. 
Behind  this  contention  there  is  a  misconception  of 
the  power  of  criticism  and  a  mistaking  of  its 
boundaries;  there  is  an  assumption  of  aristocratic 
superiority  not  warranted  by  the  facts  of  literary 


LITERARY   CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

history.  It  is  founded  on  the  belief  that  literature 
is  for  the  few  rather  than  for  the  many  and  that 
the  plain  people  are  pitifully  unable  to  appreciate 
what  is  best  unless  they  are  led  to  it  by  the  critic 
and  the  scholar.  This  belief  is  rarely  frankly 
stated,  but  it  is  held  by  many  men  of  letters;  it 
is  exprest  superabundantly  in  the  pages  of  the 
Goncourts'  'Journal,'  for  example. 

But  this  belief  can  have  for  its  foundation  only 
the  opinion  that  what  is  most  important  in  any 
art  is  its  form,  and  not  its  content ;  and  that  lit- 
erature itself  is  rather  a  matter  of  words  and  of 
phrases  than  a  question  of  thought  and  of  feeling. 
It  is  based  on  the  theory  that  the  substance  is  of 
less  consequence  than  the  style  and  that  the  tech- 
nic  is  more  vital  than  the  idea.  The  plain  people 
care  little  for  technic,  for  style,  for  mere  words 
and  phrases;  they  are  perhaps  unduly  impatient 
at  the  frequent  discussion  of  these  qualities  by 
the  literary  experts.  Altho  they  are  not  so 
negligent  of  manner  as  many  assert,  they  give 
their  chief  attention  to  the  matter  in  hand.  They 
are  ready  always  to  respond  to  emotion  and  to 
thought;  and  in  this  they  are  capable  of  rising  to 
unexpected  heights. 

The  reputation  of  the  great  poets  has  not  been 
made  by  the  scholarly  critics  chiefly,  but  rather 
by  the  plain  people  of  their  own  time  or  of  the 
years  immediately  following.  Almost  every  one 
of  the  commanding  names  in  literature  belongs 
132 


LITERARY   CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

to  a  man  who  enjoyed  a  wide  popularity  while  he 
was  alive.  Sophocles  was  not  only  the  most  power- 
fulbutalsothemostapplauded  of  Greek  dramatists. 
Shakspere  was  the  favorite  of  the  groundlings 
who  flocked  to  the  Globe  Theater;  and  Moliere's 
plays  drew  large  audiences  oftener  than  those  of 
any  of  his  rivals.  Goethe's  lyrics  were  on  the 
lips  of  the  young  men  and  maidens  of  Germany 
while  he  was  yet  alive  in  Weimar.  Among  the 
lyceum  audiences  of  New  England,  in  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  no  lecturer  was  more 
welcome  than  Emerson. 

Many  a  third-rate  poet,  failing  of  popular  ap- 
preciation, altho  praised  by  his  fellow-men  of 
letters,  has  placed  his  hope  in  after  ages,  when 
the  taste  of  the  people  might  be  more  cultivated, 
and  has,  therefore,  filed  an  appeal  to  posterity. 
But  there  is  no  case  on  record  where  posterity 
has  heard  the  appeal  and  reversed  the  unfavor- 
able verdict  of  the  plain  people  of  the  author's 
own  time.  If  popularity  is  not  obtained  within 
the  author's  lifetime,  or  within  threescore  years 
and  ten  after  his  birth, it  is  never*obtained  at  all. 
When  the  contemporary  judgment  of  the  broad 
public  is  unfavorable,  it  is  final;  and  there  is  no 
recourse  to  any  later  tribunal.  On  the  other 
hand,  when  this  contemporary  judgment  is 
favorable,  it  is  not  final ;  and  often  the  cause  is 
reargued  in  every  succeeding  century. 

In  other  words,  the  next  generation  will  select 


LITERARY   CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

out  of  the  many  popular  authors  of  this  genera- 
tion the  few  that  it  will  esteem  worthy  of  sur- 
vival; but  it  will  never  attempt  to  galvanize  into 
life  any  of  the  unpopular  authors.  In  fact,  in 
the  history  of  every  truly  great  writer's  reputa- 
tion we  can  observe  that  he  was  relished  by  the 
plain  people  of  his  own  day,  whether  or  not  he 
was  adequately  appreciated  by  the  scholarly 
critics  who  were  his  contemporaries.  More  than 
one  truly  great  writer  has  past  thru  this  life 
amusing  or  consoling  his  fellow-men;  and  he 
has  then  died  before  the  scholarly  critics  ever  be- 
gan to  surmise  that  he  was  really  deserving  of 
their  respectful  attention.  Cervantes  certainly 
was  one  of  these  favorites  of  the  plain  people, 
unrecognized  by  the  literary  experts  of  his  own 
tongue;  and  probably  Shakspere  was  another. 
Not  a  few  of  the  novelists  widely  read  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  twentieth  century  will  be  abso- 
lutely forgotten  at  the  end  of  it;  but,  on  the 
other  hand,  such  of  our  writers  of  fiction  as  may 
be  enjoyed  at  the  end  of  the  century  will  have 
been  selected  by  the  unerring  hand  of  Time  from 
the  list  of  those  known  to-day  wherever  the 
English  language  is  spoken. 

This  may  seem  to  some  a  hazardous  conten- 
tion, altho  it  is  borne  out  by  the  facts  of  lit- 
erary history;  and  it  is  absolutely  fatal  to  any 
theory  that  criticism  has  the  power  to  pass  upon 


LITERARY  CRITICISM   AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

the  credentials  of  contemporary  poets  and  ro- 
mancers. This  theory  is  essentially  aristocratic; 
it  sets  up  a  caste  of  culture  as  the  only  one  quali- 
fied to  decide  what  is  good  or  bad  in  literature. 
Upon  questions  of  style,  of  form,  of  rhetoric,  of 
construction,  of  art  in  general,  this  aristocracy 
of  education  is  often  the  best  judge,  but  in  con- 
sidering the  essence  of  literature,  the  vital  qual- 
ities to  be  felt  rather  than  to  be  formulated,  the 
life  of  the  spirit,  its  judgment  is  not  so  good  as 
that  of  the  plain  people,  who  know  what  they 
like  altho  they  do  not  know  why.  The  plain 
people  took  to  heart  the  '  Pilgrim's  Progress  '  long 
before  the  cultivated  caste  discovered  its  worth ; 
and  they  thrilled  to  the  Gettysburg  address  as  it 
fell  from  the  lips  of  the  homely  speaker. 

The  aristocrats  of  culture  put  their  trust  in 
academic  standards,  as  becomes  the  custodians 
of  tradition.  They  look  to  the  past  only;  they 
rarely  understand  the  present;  they  are  prone  to 
distrust  the  future.  They  did  not  perceive  the 
scope  of  'Don  Quixote,'  of  'Hamlet,'  of  the 
'Cid,'  and  of  the  '  Femmes  Savantes.'  They 
were  outraged  by  Hugo's  '  Hernani '  as  they  were 
disgusted  with  Ibsen's  'Ghosts.'  They  are  rarely 
open-minded  enough  to  disentangle  what  is 
praiseworthy  oat  of  the  powerful  works  which 
revolt  them — Zola's,  for  example,  and  Whitman's. 
But  it  is  only  fair  to  suggest  that  they  are  swift  to 

'35 


LITERARY   CRITICISM    AND    BOOK-REVIEWING 

belaud  delicate  art  and  technical  skill.  They  found 
it  easy  to  appreciate  Vergil  and  Racine,  Gray  and 
Longfellow,  and  in  general  any  other  poet  who 
has  felt  himself  to  be  the  heir  of  the  ages  and 
who  has  walked  reverently  in  the  footprints  of 
his  predecessors.  They  are,  therefore,  more  likely 
to  be  right  in  their  opinions  on  authors  of  the 
second  rank  than  in  their  judgments  upon  orig- 
inal geniuses.  In  this  latter  task  their  very  edu- 
cation seems  often  to  be  a  disadvantage,  sophis- 
ticating their  perceptions  and  leaving  them  less 
ready  to  understand  the  elemental  and  the  univer- 
sal than  the  plain  people  are.  It  may  even  lead 
them  to  distrust  a  writer  of  primitive  force, 
chiefly  because  the  plain  people  like  him. 

The  book-reviewers  are  wise  in  rejecting  the 
advice  of  the  strenuous  writers  quoted  early  in 
this  paper  and  in  not  being  tempted  to  take  them- 
selves too  seriously.  It  is  enough  to  give  them 
pause  to  recall  the  fate  of  more  than  one  of  their 
predecessors  and  to  remember  that  when  a  book- 
reviewer  decides  that  it  is  his  duty  to  scourge 
the  incompetent  and  to  drive  out  the  false  pre- 
tenders, he  may  be  clever  enough  to  select  Robert 
Montgomery  as  his  victim,  or  he  may  be  unlucky 
enough  to  happen  upon  Byron  or  Keats  or 
Wordsworth. 

(1902.) 


136 


FAMILIAR  VERSE 


[This  essay  was  written  to  serve  as  an  introduction  to  an 
anthology  of  '  American  Familiar  Verse '  and  is  here  reprinted 
by  permission  of  Messrs.  Longmans,  Green  &  Co.] 


VII 
FAMILIAR  VERSE 


FAMILIAR  VERSE  "  is  the  apt  term  Cowper 
chose  to  use  in  describing  the  lyric  of  com- 
mingled sentiment  and  playfulness  which  is  more 
generally  and  more  carelessly  called  vers  de  so- 
cittt.  The  lyric  of  this  sort  is  less  emotional,  or 
less  expansive,  than  the  regular  lyric;  and  it  seeks 
to  veil  the  depth  of  its  feeling  behind  a  debonair 
assumption  of  gaiety.  In  fact  its  feeling  must 
not  be  deep,  since  it  is  the  exact  opposite  of  the 
poetry  of  genuine  inspiration.  It  cannot  deal 
with  the  profounder  passions,  and  "its  light 
touch,"  so  Bagehot  declares,  "  is  not  competent 
to  express  eager,  intense  emotion."  Familiar 
verse  is  in  poetry  closely  akin  to  what  in  prose 
is  known  as  the  "eighteenth-century  essay"; 
Prior  and  Gay  were  early  representatives  of  the 
one,  as  Steele  and  Addison  were  the  creators  of 
the  other.  Familiar  verse  is  a  far  better  designa- 
tion than  vers  de  societt  for  two  reasons :  first, 
because  the  use  of  a  French  phrase  might  seem 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

to  imply  that  these  witty  and  graceful  poems  are 
more  abundant  in  French  literature  than  in  Eng- 
lish,— which  is  not  the  fact;  and  second,  because, 
however  light  and  bright  these  lyrics  may  be, 
they  are  not  mere  society-verses,  with  only  the 
glitter  and  the  emptiness  of  the  fashionable 
parade.  They  are  not  the  idle  amusement  of  those 

Who  tread  with  jaded  step  the  weary  mill  — 
Grind  at  the  wheel,  and  call  it  "  pleasure  "  still; 
Gay  without  mirth,  fatigued  without  employ, 
Slaves  to  the  joyless  phantom  of  a  joy. 

No  doubt,  social  verse  should  have  polish,  and 
finish,  and  the  well-bred  ease  of  the  man  of  the 
world ;  but  it  ought  also  to  carry  a  suggestion  at 
least  of  the  more  serious  aspects  of  life.  It  should 
not  be  frothily  frivolous  or  coldly  cynical,  any 
more  than  it  should  be  broadly  comic  or  boister- 
ously funny.  It  is  at  liberty  to  hint  at  hidden 
tears,  even  when  it  seems  to  be  wreathed  in 
smiles.  It  has  no  right  to  parade  mere  clever- 
ness; and  it  must  shun  all  affectation,  as  it  must 
avoid  all  self-consciousness.  It  should  appear 
to  possess  a  colloquial  carelessness  which  is  ever 
shrinking  from  the  commonplace,  and  which  has 
succeeded  in  concealing  every  trace  of  that  labor 
of  the  literary  artist  by  which  alone  it  has  attained 
its  seemingly  spontaneous  perfection. 

"  Familiar  verse  "  is  perhaps  somewhat  more 
exact  than  the  term  once  employed  by  Mr.  Sted- 
140 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

man, — "patrician  rimes,"  which  is  a  designa- 
tion possibly  a  little  chilly  for  these  airy  lyrics. 
To  fall  fully  within  the  definition,  so  the  late 
Frederick  Locker-Lampson  asserted,  a  poem  must 
be  brief  and  brilliant;  and  the  younger  Tom  Hood 
added  that  it  ought  also  to  be  buoyant.  Brevity, 
brilliancy,  buoyancy, — these  are  qualities  we  can- 
not fail  to  find  in  the  best  of  Locker-Lampson's 
own  verses,  in  Praed's,  in  Prior's, — and  also  in 
Holmes's,  in  Lowell's  and  in  Bret  Harte's. 

Brevity  it  must  have  first  of  all;  and  Locker- 
Lampson  excluded  the  'Rape  of  the  Lock'  "on 
account  of  its  length,  which  renders  it  much  too 
important, "  altho  it  "would  otherwise  be  one  of 
the  finest  specimens  ofvers  de  societt  in  any  lan- 
guage." Here  it  is  permissible  to  echo  the 
opinion  of  Poe,  who  held  that  a  poem  could 
scarcely  exceed  one  hundred  lines  in  length  under 
penalty  of  losing  its  unity  of  impression.  But  on 
the  other  hand,  the  poem  of  this  species  must 
not  be  excessively  condensed,  or  else  it  is  not 
important  enough.  A  couplet  does  not  give 
room  to  turn  around  in.  Gay's 


Life  is  a  jest,  and  all  things  show  it; 
1  said  so  once,  and  now  I  know  it, 


and  Pope's 


I  am  his  Highness's  dog  at  Kew. 
Pray,  sir,  tell  me,— whose  dog  are  you? 
141 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

have  rather  the  sharp  snap  of  the  epigram  than 
the  gentler  flow  of  genuine  familiar  verse.  And 
so  certain  of  the  slighter  pieces  in  the  Greek  an- 
thology, lovely  as  they  are  and  exquisite,  lack 
the  modest  amplitude  fairly  to  be  expected  from 
a  poem  which  claims  admission  into  this  charmed 
circle. 

Brilliant  it  must  be  also;  and  this  requirement 
excludes  'Sally  in  Our  Alley, 'for  example,  because 
this  is  "too  homely  and  too  entirely  simple  and 
natural";  and  it  keeps  out  'John  Gilpin  '  as  well, 
because  this  is  too  frankly  comic  in  its  intent,  too 
boldly  funny.  But  the  brilliancy  must  not  be  ex- 
cessive; and  the  diffused  glow  of  the  incandes- 
cent lamp  is  better  than  the  sputtering  glare  of 
the  arc-light.  If  the  brilliancy  is  attained  by  too 
violent  and  too  obvious  an  effort,  the  light  lyric 
is  likely  to  harden  into  artificiality;  and  this  is 
a  danger  that  even  Praed  does  not  always  escape. 
His  '  Chaunt  of  the  Brazen  Head '  has  a  luster 
that  is  almost  metallic;  the  sparkle  is  undeniable, 
but  in  time  the  insistent  antithesis  reveals  itself 
as  mechanical  at  least,  not  to  call  it  either  tricky 
or  tiresome. 

Buoyancy  is  the  third  requisite ;  and  this  is  not 
so  easy  to  define  as  the  others.  Yet  its  necessity 
is  plain  enough  when  we  note  how  heavy  cer- 
tain metrical  efforts  may  be,  altho  they  achieve 
brevity  and  even  a  superficial  brilliance.  They 
142 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

lack  the  final  ease  and  the  careless  felicity;  they 
are  not  wholly  free  from  an  awkwardness  that  is 
not  unfairly  to  be  termed  lumbering.  For  ex- 
ample, buoyancy  is  just  what  is  lacking  in  the 
riming  epistle  of  John  Wilson  Croker  'To  Miss 
Peel  on  her  Marriage ' — quatrains  which  Locker- 
Lampson  held  in  sufficient  esteem  to  include  in 
his  carefully  chosen  '  Lyra  Elegantiarum '  and 
which  Mr.  Swinburne  despisingly  dismist  as 
"twenty  villainous  lines." 

Just  as  comedy  is  ever  in  danger  of  declining 
into  farce  (a  mishap  that  has  almost  befallen  the 
'Rivals,'  for  example),  or  else  of  stiffening  into 
the  serious  drama  (a  turning  aside  that  is  visible 
in  '  Froufrou ' ),  so  in  like  manner  has  familiar 
verse  ever  to  avoid  breadth  of  humor  on  the  one 
side  and  depth  of  feeling  on  the  other.  It  must 
eschew  not  merely  coarseness  or  vulgarity,  but 
even  free  and  hearty  laughter;  and  it  must  re- 
frain from  dealing  not  only  with  the  soul-plumb- 
ing abysses  of  the  tragic,  but  even  with  the 
ground-swell  of  any  sweeping  emotion.  It  must 
keep  on  the  crest  of  the  waves,  midway  between 
the  chattering  triviality  of  the  murmuring  shal- 
lows and  the  silent  profundity  of  the  depths  that 
are  dumb. 

Perhaps  this  is  one  reason  why  so  few  of  these 
brevet-poems  have  been  the  work  of  the  greater 
wits  or  of  the  greater  poets;  familiar  verse  is 
143 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

too  serious  to  carry  all  the  fun  of  the  jesters  and 
too  slight  to  convey  the  more  solemn  message 
of  the  major  bards.  Rather  has  it  been  the  casual 
recreation  of  true  lyrists  not  in  the  front  rank;  or 
else  it  has  been  the  sudden  excursion  of  those 
not  reckoned  among  the  songsters,  often  men  of 
the  world,  for  once  achieving  in  verse  a  seeming 
spontaneity,  like  that  which  gives  zest  to  a  de- 
lightful conversation. 

Perhaps  again  this  is  a  reason  why  familiar 
verse  can  be  found  flourishing  most  luxuriantly 
when  the  man  of  the  world  is  himself  most 
abundant  and  when  he  has  helped  to  set  up  an 
ideal  of  sparkling  nimbleness  in  the  give-and- 
take  of  social  encounter.  "  When  society  ceases 
to  be  simple,  it  becomes  skeptical,"  and  when  it 
"  becomes  refined,  it  begins  to  dread  the  exhibi- 
tion of  strong  feeling; — "  so  wrote  one  of  the 
reviewers  of  Locker-Lampson's  collection;  and 
"  in  such  an  atmosphere,  emotion  takes  refuge  in 
jest,  and  passion  hides  itself  in  skepticism  of 
passion."  And  the  reviewer  added  that  there  is 
a  delicious  piquancy  in  the  poets  who  represent 
this  social  mood,  and  who  are  put  in  a  class 
apart  by  "  the  way  they  play  bo-peep  with  their 
feelings." 

In  the  stately  sentences  of  his  time  the  elder 
Disraeli  declared  that  in  the  production  of  vers 
de  socittt,  "genius  will  not  always  be  sufficient 
144 


FAMILIAR  VERSE 

to  impart  that  grace  of  amenity  which  seems 
peculiar  to  those  who  are  accustomed  to  elegant 
society.  These  productions  are  more  the  effu- 
sions of  taste  than  genius,  and  it  is  not  sufficient 
that  the  poet  is  inspired  by  the  Muse,  he  must 
also  suffer  his  concise  page  to  be  polished  by  the 
hand  of  the  Graces." 

Locker-Lampson  maintained  that  "the  tone 
should  not  be  pitched  high ;  it  should  be  idiomatic, 
and  rather  in  the  conversational  key;  the  rhythm 
should  be  crisp  and  sparkling,  and  the  rime  fre- 
quent and  never  forced,  while  the  entire  poem 
should  be  marked  by  tasteful  moderation,  high 
finish,  and  completeness:  for,  however  trivial 
the  subject-matter  may  be,  indeed  rather  in  pro- 
portion to  its  triviality,  subordination  to  the  rules 
of  composition  and  perfection  of  execution  should 
be  strictly  enforced."  And  Mr.  Austin  Dobson, 
drawing  up  '  Twelve  Good  Rules '  for  the 
writer  of  familiar  verse,  advised  him  to  be  "  col- 
loquial but  not  commonplace,"  to  be  as  witty  as 
he  liked,  to  be  "  serious  by  accident,"  and  to  be 
"pathetic  with  the  greatest  discretion." 


THOSE  who  may  search  Greek  literature  for 
frequent  examples  of  familiar  verse  are  doomed 
to  disappointment  and  even  in  the  lovely  lyrics 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

of  the  '  Anthology,'  so  human,  so  sad,  so  perfect 
in  precision  of  phrase,  we  fail  to  find  the  light- 
ness, the  playfulness,  the  gaiety  of  true  vers  de 
soctiU.  We  note  brevity  nearly  always,  bril- 
liancy sometimes,  and  even  buoyancy  occasion- 
ally; we  mark  a  lapidary  concision  that  only  Lan- 
dor,  of  all  the  .moderns,  was  ever  able  to  achieve; 
but  we  feel  that  the  tone  is  a  little  too  grave  and 
a  little  too  austere.  Perhaps  the  Greek  spirit  was 
too  simple  and  too  lofty  to  stoop  to  the  pleasantry 
and  prettiness  of  familiar  verse.  Perhaps  the 
satiric  reaction  against  excessive  romanticism, 
which  sustains  so  much  modern  familiar  verse, 
was  not  possible  before  the  birth  of  romance 
itself.  Perhaps,  indeed,  the  banter  and  the 
gently  satiric  playfulness  of  social  verse  was  not 
to  be  expected  in  a  race,  no  matter  how  gifted  it 
might  be  lyrically,  which  kept  woman  in  social 
inferiority  and  denied  her  the  social  privileges 
that  give  to  modern  society  its  charm  and  its 
variety. 

At  first  glance  it  would  seem  as  tho  more  than 
one  lyric  of  Anacreon  at  least,  and  perhaps  of 
Theocritus  also,  ought  to  fall  well  within  the 
most  rigid  definition  of  familiar  verse.  But  there 
is  scarcely  a  single  poem  of  Anacreon's  which 
really  approaches  the  type.  The  world  for  which 
he  wrote  reveals  itself  as  very  narrow;  and  he  is 
found  to  be  devoid  of  (<  catholicity  of  human  in- 
146 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

terest,"  as  Tom  Hood  asserted.  His  verses  are  a 
little  lacking  in  tenderness  of  sentiment;  and  as 
Jebb  said,  Anacreon's  "  sensuousness  is  tem- 
pered merely  by  intellectual  charm," — and  this 
is  not  what  we  require  in  social  verse. 

Theocritus  also,  exquisite  as  are  his  vignettes 
of  Alexandrian  life,  perfect  as  they  are  in  tone 
and  feeling,  clear  cut  as  an  intaglio  and  delightful 
as  a  Tanagra  figurine, — Theocritus  is  at  once  too 
idyllic  and  too  realistic.  His  verses  are 
without  certain  of  the  characteristics  which 
are  imperative  in  genuine  familiar  verse.  They  are 
at  once  a  little  too  homely  and  a  little  too  poetic. 
If  a  selection  from  Greek  literature  was  absolutely 
imperative,  probably  a  copy  of  verses  combining 
brevity,  brilliancy,  and  buoyancy  could  be  found 
more  easily  among  the  scanty  lyrics  of  Agathias 
or  of  Antipater  than  amid  the  larger  store  of  The- 
ocritus or  of  Anacreon. 

Perhaps  it  is  the  more  prominent  position  of 
woman  in  Rome  which  makes  a  search  in  Latin 
literature  a  more  certain  pleasure.  Yet  the 
world  in  which  Catullus  lived,  that  "tenderest 
of  Roman  poets  nineteen  hundred  years  ago," 
while  it  was  externally  most  luxurious',  had  an 
underlying  rudeness  and  an  ill-concealed  coarse- 
ness. And  Catullus  himself,  with  all  his  nimble 
wit,  his  scholarly  touch,  his  instinctive  certainty  of 
taste,  was  consumed  by  too  fierce  a  flame  of  pas- 
'47 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

sion  to  be  satisfied  often  with  the  leisurely  inter- 
weaving of  jest  and  earnest  which  we  look  for 
in  the  songster  of  society.  Only  too  infrequently 
does  he  allow  himself  the  courtly  grace  of 
familiar  verse, — as  he  does  in  his  '  Dedication  for 
a  Volume  of  Lyrics,'  in  his  'Invitation  to  Din- 
ner' and  in  his  'Morning  Call,'  so  sympatheti- 
cally paraphrased  by  Landor. 

Half  a  generation  later  we  come  to  Horace,  a 
perfect  master  of  the  lighter  lyric.  He  has  the 
wide  knowledge  of  a  man  of  the  world  and  the 
consummate  ease  of  an  accomplished  craftsman  in 
verse.  He  can  achieve  both  the  "  curious  felic- 
ity "and  the  "art  that  hides  itself."  And  his  tone, 
so  Walter  Bagehot  insisted,  'is  that  of  prime 
ministers;  the  easy  philosophy  is  that  of  courts 
and  parliaments.  .  .  .  He  is  but  the  extreme  and 
perfect  type  of  a  whole  class  of  writers,  some  of 
whom  exist  in  every  literary  age,  and  who  give 
expression  to  what  we  may  call  the  poetry  of 
equanimity, — that  is,  the  world's  view  of  itself, 
its  self-satisfaction,  its  conviction  that  you  must 
bear  what  comes,  not  hope  for  much,  think  some 
evil,  never  be  excited,  admire  little,  and  then  you 
will  be  at  peace."  Perhaps  this  view  of  Horace's 
philosophy  is  a  little  too  disenchanted;  but 
Bagehot  here  suggested  why  this  Roman  poet 
was  likely  to  be  one  of  the  masters  of  familiar 
verse;  and  it  is  Horace's  catholicity  of  human 
148 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

interest,  even  more  than  his  naturalness,  which 
makes  his  lines  sometimes  so  startlingly  modern. 
It  was  easy  for  Thackeray  to  find  London  equiva- 
lents for  the  Latin  '  Persicos  odi,'and  for  Moliere 
earlier,  and  Mr.  Austin  Dobson  later,  to  imitate 
'  Donee  gratus.'  But  there  is  little  need  to  cite 
further,  for  no  poet  has  tempted  more  adapters 
and  translators, — not  always  indeed  to  his  profit, 
since  it  is  only  by  an  inspiration  as  happy  as  the 
original  that  any  modern  may  hope  to  equal  the 
sureness  of  stroke  characteristic  of  a  poet  who 
shunned  the  remote  adjective  and  contented 
himself  with  the  vocabulary  of  every  day. 

It  is  not  pleasant  to  pass  down  from  the  be- 
nign rule  of  Augustus  to  the  tyranny  of  Nero, 
and  to  contrast  the  constant  manliness  of  Horace 
with  the  servility  of  Martial,  a  servility  finding 
relief  now  and  again  in  the  utmost  bitterness  of 
unrestrained  invective.  Horace,  with  all  his 
equanimity,  was  never  indifferent  to  ideas,  and 
he  had  an  ethical  code  of  his  own;  but  Martial 
rarely  revealed  even  a  hint  of  moral  feeling.  He 
was  cynical  of  necessity:  and,  therefore,  is  he 
habitually  too  hard  and  too  rasping  to  attain  the 
geniality  which  belongs  to  the  better  sort  of  social 
verse.  Few  of  his  poems  are  really  long  enough 
to  be  styled  lyrics;  and  the  vast  majority  are 
merely  epigrams,  with  the  wilful  condensation 
and  the  arbitrary  pointedness,  that  have  been  the 
149 


FAMILIAR    VERSE 

bane  of  the  epigram  ever  since  Martial  set  the 
bad  example.  But  even  tho  the  Latin  poet,  as 
Professor  Mackail  asserts,  made  his  strongest  ap- 
peal "to  all  that  was  worst  in  Roman  taste, — 
its  heavy-handedness,  its  admiration  of  verbal 
cleverness,  its  tendency  toward  brutality,"  still 
now  and  again  it  is  possible  to  pick  out  a  poem 
that  falls  fairly  within  the  definition  of  familiar 
verse, —  'In  habentem  amaenas  aedes,'  for  ex- 
ample. 

HI 

WHEN  at  last  we  pass  over  the  long  suspension- 
bridge  that  arches  the  dark  gulf  between  the 
ancient  world  and  the  modern,  we  discover 
that  the  more  direct  inheritors  of  the  Latin 
tradition,  the  Italians  and  the  Spaniards,  have 
neither  of  them  contributed  abundantly  to  this 
special  department  of  lyric  poetry.  It  may  be 
that  the  Spanish  language  is  too  grandiloquent 
and  too  sonorous  to  be  readily  playful ;  and  per- 
haps the  Spanish  character  itself  is  either  too 
foftily  dignified  or  too  realistically  shrewd  to  be 
able  often  to  achieve  that  harmonious  blending 
of  the  grave  and  the  gay  which  is  essential  in 
familiar  verse.  It  is  true  that  Lope  de  Vega, 
early  master  of  every  form  of  the  drama  and 
bold  adventurer  into  every  other  realm  of  litera- 
ture, has  left  us  a  few  poems  that  might  demand 
150 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

inclusion ;  and  among  them  is  an  ingenious  sonnet 
on  the  difficulty  of  making  a  sonnet,  which  was 
cleverly  Englished  by  the  late  H.  C.  6unner  and 
which  may  have  suggested  to  Voiture  his  more 
famous  rondeau,  adroitly  imitated  by  Mr.  Austin 
Dobson.  No  doubt  there  are  a  few  other  Spanish 
poets— Gil  Vicente,  for  one— who  might  be  en- 
listed as  contributors  to  an  international  anthology 
of  familiar  verse,  but  the  fact  remains  that  the 
Spanish  section  of  any  such  collection  would  be 
slighter  even  than  the  Italian. 

And  the  Italian  contribution  would  not  be 
very  important,  in  spite  of  the  national  facility  in 
improvisation,  —or  perhaps  because  of  this  dan- 
gerous gift.  In  the  earlier  Italian  Renascence  ex- 
istence seems  to  have  been  almost  too  strenuous 
for  social  verse.  As  we  call  the  roll  of  the  Italian 
poets,  we  may  note  the  names  of  not  a  few 
masters  of  the  passionate  lyric  and  of  the  scorch- 
ing satire,  but  we  find  scarcely  any  writer  who 
has  left  us  verses  of  the  requisite  brevity,  brilliancy 
andbuoyancy.  InRossetti's  'Dante  and  his  Circle' 
there  is  more  than  one  poem  that  seems  to  have 
thistriplequalification,althoon  more  careful  exam- 
ination the  sentiment  is  seen  to  be  too  sincere  and 
too  frankly  exprest,  or  else  the  tone  is  too  rarely 
playful  to  warrant  any  liberal  selection  from  these 
fascinating  pages.  Perhaps  even  from  this  volume 
a  more  lively  little  piece  might  here  and  there  be 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

borrowed,  such  for  instance  as  Sacchetti's  catch 
'On  a  Wet  Day.'  A  little  later  there  is  Berni, 
whose  metrical  portrait  of  himself  might  fairly 
be  compared — and  not  altogether  to  its  disadvan- 
tage— with  one  or  another  of  Praed's  caressingly 
tender  sketches  of  character.  The  Italians  have 
no  lack  of  biting  epigram  and  of  pertinent  pas- 
quinade; and  they  excel  in  broad  burlesque  and 
in  laughable  parody.  But  the  mock-heroic,  how- 
ever clever  it  may  be,  is  not  the  same  as  familiar 
verse.  And  even  in  the  nineteenth  century, 
where  there  was  a  firmer  social  solidarity,  the  only 
name  which  forces  itself  on  our  attention  is  that 
of  Giusti, — whose  idiomatic  ballads  have  not  un- 
fairly been  likened  to  the  songs  of  Beranger. 

The  more  northern  languages  are  less  likely  to 
reward  research,  partly  because  of  the  prolonged 
rudeness  of  the  Teutonic  tongues  and  partly  be- 
cause of  the  more  rigid  seriousness  of  the  folk 
that  speak  them.  There  is  a  true  lyric  grace  in 
the  songs  of  the  minnesingers,  despite  their  fre- 
quent artificiality ;  but  they  again  are  too  direct 
and  too  purely  lyric.  However  ingenious  they 
may  be,  they  are  without  the  wit  and  the  humor 
which  we  look  for  in  familiar  verse.  Even  the 
later  and  far  greater  Goethe,  who,  for  all  his 
Olympian  serenity,  revealed  at  times  the  posses- 
sion of  that  specific  levity  which  is  a  prerequisite 
for  the  songster  of  society, —even  Goethe  chose 
to  condense  his  wit  into  the  distichs  of  his 
152 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

'Xenien,'  rather  than  to  commingle  it  with  his 
ballading.  He  himself  thought  it  strange  that 
with  all  he  had  done,  there  was  no  one  of  his 
poems  "that  would  suit  the  Lutheran  hymn- 
book";  and  it  is  perhaps  even  stranger  that 
scarcely  any  one  of  them  would  suit  such  an 
anthology  as  has  been  here  suggested.  Perhaps 
a  claim  might  be  made  for  his  '  Ergo  Bibamus,' 
which  has  almost  briskness  enough  to  warrant 
its  acceptance. 

From  Heine,  of  course,  a  choice  would  be  less 
difficult;  and  both  the  'Widow  and  the  Daughter' 
and  the  '  Grammar  of  the  Stars  '  seem  to  meet  all 
the  requirements.  But  affluent  as  Heine  is  in 
sentiment  and  master  as  he  is  both  of  girding 
satire  and  of  airy  persiflage,  there  is  ever  a  heart- 
break to  be  heard  in  his  verses, — an  unforgetta- 
ble sob.  The  chords  of  his  lyre  are  really  too 
deep  and  too  resonant  for  him  to  chant  trifles. 
The  "  brave  soldier  in  the  war  of  liberation  of 
humanity,"  as  he  styled  himself,  even  in  his  pa- 
raded mockery  and  in  his  irrepressible  wit,  was 
really  too  much  in  earnest  to  happen  often  on 
the  happy  mean  which  makes  familiar  verse  a 
possibility. 

IV 

IN  the  French  language,  at  last,  the  seeker  after 
vers  de  soctite  finds  not  only  the  name,  but  the 
thing  itself,  the  real  thing;  and  he  finds  it  in 


FAMILIAR    VERSE 

abundance  and  of  the  best  quality.  Some  part 
of  this  abundance  is  due,  no  doubt,  to  the  French 
tongue  itself,  for,  as  a  shrewd  writer  has  reminded 
us,  "  a  language  long  employed  by  a  delicate  and 
critical  society  is  a  treasury  of  dexterous  felici- 
ties " ;  it  may  not  be  what  Emerson  finely  called 
"fossil  poetry,"  but  it  is  "crystallized  esprit." 
Society-verse  might  be  expected  to  flourish  most 
luxuriantly  among  a  people  governed  by  the 
social  instinct  as  the  French  are,  and  keenly  ap- 
preciative of  the  social  qualities.  The  French 
invented  the  salon,  which  is  the  true  hothouse  for 
familiar  verse;  and  they  have  raised  both  corre- 
spondence and  conversation  to  the  dignity  of  fine 
arts.  As  we  scan  the  history  of  the  past  three 
centuries  we  note  that  in  France  society  and  lit- 
erature have  met  on  terms  that  approach  equality 
far  more  nearly  than  in  any  other  country.  The 
French  men  of  letters  have  often  been  men  of 
the  world,  even  if  the  French  men  of  the  world 
have  been  men  of  letters  no  more  frequently  than 
the  English. 

Moreover  it  is  in  prose  rather  than  in  poetry 
that  the  French  have  achieved  their  amplest  tri- 
umphs. Whatever  reservations  an  English  reader 
must  make  in  his  praise  of  French  poetry,  he  need 
make  none  in  his  eulogy  of  French  prose.  In 
prose  the  French  have  commonly  a  perfection 
to  which  we  who  use  English  can  pretend  only 

J54 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

too  rarely.  Their  prose  has  order  and  balance 
and  harmony;  it  flows  limpidly  with  a  charming 
transparency;  it  is  ever  lucid,  ever  flexible,  ever 
various;  it  has  at  once  an  obvious  polish  and  an 
apparent  ease.  And  to  these  precious  qualifi- 
cations for  a  form  of  poetry  seemingly  so  unam- 
bitious as  social  verse,  must  be  added  the  pos- 
session not  only  of  the  wit  and  the  vivacity  which 
are  acknowledged  characteristics  of  the  French, 
but  also  their  ownership  of  something  far  more 
needful — the  gift  of  comedy. 

"  For  many  years  the  French  have  not  been 
more  celebrated  for  memoirs  which  professedly 
describe  a  real  society  than  they  have  been  for 
the  light  social  song  which  embodies  its  senti- 
ments and  pours  forth  its  spirit,"  said  Bagehot, 
writing  in  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
He  maintained  that  the  French  mind  had  a  genius 
for  the  poetry  of  society  because  it  had  "the 
quickest  insight  into  the  exact  relation  of  sur- 
rounding superficial  phenomena."  He  held  that 
the  spirit  of  these  lighter  lyrics  is  ever  half  mirth- 
ful and  that  they  cannot  produce  a  profound  im- 
pression. "A  gentle  pleasure,  half  sympathy, 
half  amusement,  is  that  at  which  they  aim,"  he 
suggested;  adding  that,  "they  do  not  please  us 
equally  in  all  moods  of  mind:  sometimes  they 
seem  nothing  and  nonsense, — like  society  itself." 

Perhaps  it  is  in  consequence  of  the  prosaic  ele- 

155 


FAMILIAR    VERSE 

ment  perceptible  in  much  of  their  more  preten- 
tious poetry  that  the  French  themselves  have  not 
considered  curiously  their  own  familiar  verse. 
While  there  are  nearly  half  a  dozen  collections  of 
the  vers  de  societe  of  the  English  language,  a  dili- 
gent seeking  has  failed  to  find  a  single  similar 
anthology  in  French.  A  book  of  ballades  there  is, 
but  the  most  of  these  are  serious  in  tone  rather 
than  serio-comic;  the  pertest  of  the  many  epi- 
grammatic quatrains  of  the  language  have  been 
gathered  into  an  engaging  little  volume;  but  a 
selection  of  the  best  of  their  lighter  lyrics,  having 
brevity,  brilliancy,  and  buoyancy,  has  not  yet  been 
undertaken  by  any  French  critic,  altho  he  would 
have  only  the  embarrassment  of  choosing  from  out 
a  superabundance  of  enticing  examples. 

For  the  most  part  the  vigorous  verse  of  Villon, 
that  "warm  voice  from  the  slums  of  Paris,"  has 
too  poignant  a  melancholy  to  be  included,  for  all 
its  bravado  gaiety ;  and  though  he  tries  to  carry 
it  off  with  a  laugh,  the  disreputable  poet  fails  to 
disguise  the  depth  of  his  feeling.  And  yet  it 
would  be  impossible  to  exclude  the  famous 
'  Ballade  of  Old-Time  Ladies  '  with  its  unforget- 
table refrain,  "Where  are  the  snows  of  yester- 
year ?  "  A  larger  selection  would  be  easier  from 
Villon's  contemporary,  Charles  of  Orleans,  long- 
time a  prisoner  in  England,— a  poet  far  less 
energetic  and  not  so  disenchanted,  but  possess- 
156 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

ing  by  birth  "the  manners  and  tone  of  good 
society. "  Stevenson  especially  praised  his  rondels 
for  their  "inimitable  lightness  and  delicacy  of 
touch  "  and  declared  that  the  royal  lyrist's  "  lines 
go  with  a  lilt  and  sing  themselves  to  music  of 
their  own." 

The  rondel  was  the  fixed  form  in  which  Charles 
of  Orleans  was  most  often  successful,  altho  he 
frequently  attempted  the  ballade  also.  This 
larger  form  the  later  Clement  Marot  managed 
with  assured  mastery.  One  of  the  best  known  of 
his  more  playful  poems  is  the  ballade  a  double 
refrain  setting  forth  the  duplicity  of  '  Brother 
Lubin,'  a  poem  which  has  been  rendered  into 
English  both  by  Bryant  and  Longfellow,  —altho 
neither  of  them  held  himself  bound  by  the  strict 
letter  of  the  law  that  prescribes  the  limitation 
and  the  ordering  of  the  rimes  properly  to  be 
expected  in  the  ballade.  As  it  happens,  the  Ameri- 
can poets  were  not  happily  inspired  in  rendering 
this  characteristic  specimen  of  Marot's  discreet 
raillery  and  metrical  agility;  and  in  their  versions 
we  fail  to  find  the  limpid  lines  and  the  polished 
irony  of  the  French  poet,  who  was  able  so  easily 
to  marry  the  elegant  with  the  natural,  —qualities 
rarely  conjoined,  even  in  French.  And  yet 
Locker-Lampson  was  able  to  paraphrase  one  of 
Clement  Marot's  lesser  lyrics,  '  Du  Rys  de 
Madame  d'Allebert,'  with  indisputable  felicity. 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

Space  fails  here  to  select  familiar  verse  from  out 
the  poems  of  Ronsard  and  Du  Bellay  and  Desportes 
or  to  excerpt  cautiously  from  the  later  poetasters 
who  were  forever  riming  in  the  ruelles  of  the 
prtcienses  and  who  clubbed  together  to  go  on 
record  in  the  celebrated  '  Guirlande  a  Julie.'  But 
Corneille  and  Moliere  and  La  Fontaine  cannot 
be  treated  in  this  cavalier  fashion.  Taine  calls 
La  Fontaine's  epistles  to  Madame  de  Sabliere 
"little  masterpieces  of  respectful  gallantry  and 
delicate  tenderness."  It  is  this  same  note  of 
tender  gallantry  which  strikes  us  in  the  poems 
which  Moliere  and  Corneille  severally  addrest  to 
the  handsome  and  alluring  actress,  Mademoiselle 
Du  Pare.  Corneille's  stanzas  are  almost  too 
elevated  in  tone  to  permit  them  to  be  termed 
familiar  verse;  and  yet  when  they  are  read  in  the 
English  rendering  of  Locker-Lampson  they  do  not 
transcend  the  modest  boundaries  of  this  minor 
department  of  poetry. 

In  the  eighteenth  century  we  come  to  Dufresny, 
with  his  'Morrows,'  a  little  comedy  in  four 
quatrains ;  to  Piron,  rather  more  inclined  to  the  pert 
and  pungent  epigram  than  to  the  more  suave  and 
gracious  song  of  society;  and  to  Voltaire,  the 
arch-wit  of  the  age,  accomplished  in  social  verse 
as  in  every  other  conceivable  form  of  literary 
endeavor.  Perhaps  it  was  of  Voltaire  that  Lowell 
was  thinking  when  he  asserted  that  in  French 
158 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

poetry  only  "the  high  polish  kept  out  the  decay." 
Yet  it  was  Lowell  himself  who  rendered  into 
flowing  English  an  epistle  of  Voltaire's  to 
Madame  Du  Chatelet,  —stanzas  in  which  the  aging 
wit  refers  to  his  years,  not  so  touchingly  as 
Corneille  had  done,  it  is  true,  but  with  dignity 
none  the  less. 

In  the  nineteenth  century  it  is  possible  to  per- 
ceive two  diverging  tendencies  in  French  vers  de 
soctiU,  one  of  them  being  rather  more  obviously 
literary  in  its  manner  and  including  certain  of  the 
more  piquant  lyrics  of  Hugo,  Musset  and  Gau- 
tier,  while  the  other  is  somewhat  humbler  in  its 
aim  and  seemingly  simpler  in  its  execution.  To 
this  second  group  belong  the  best  of  Beranger's 
ballads,  of  Gustave  Nadaud's,  and  of  Henri  Mur- 
ger's.  Of  Nadaud  the  one  perfect  example  is 
'  Carcassonne  '  (so  sympathetically  Englished  by 
John  R.  Thompson);  and  of  Murger  probably  the 
most  characteristic, —in  its  presentation  of  the 
actual  atmosphere  of  that  Bohemia  which  is  truly 
a  desert  country  by  the  sea,— is  the  lyric  of  '  Old 
Loves,'  ingeniously  paraphrased  by  Mr.  Andrew 
Lang. 

Goethe  once  declared  that  Beranger's  songs 
"  may  be  looked  upon  as  the  best  things  in  their 
kind,  especially  when  you  observe  the  burden, 
without  which  they  would  be  almost  too  earnest, 
too  pointed  and  too  epigrammatic  for  songs." 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

And  Goethe  saw  in  Beranger  a  certain  likeness  to 
Horace  and  to  Hafiz  "who  stood  in  the  same 
way  above  their  times,  satirically  and  playfully 
setting  forth  the  corruption  of  manners."  Be- 
ranger is  like  Horace  not  only  in  his  geniality  and 
in  his  freedom  from  cynicism,  but  also  in  that 
he  has  tempted  countless  English  translators,— 
mostly  to  their  own  undoing.  At  first  glance  it 
may  appear  that  poetry  so  easy  to  read  as  Horace's 
or  Beranger's,  so  direct,  so  unaffected,  ought  to 
be  transferable  into  another  tongue  without  great 
difficulty.  But  this  appearance  is  altogether  de- 
ceptive, and  those  who  carelessly  venture  upon 
translation  soon  discover  that  all  unwillingly  they 
have  been  paying  the  highest  compliment  to  the 
skill  with  which  the  metrical  artist  has  succeeded 
in  concealing  his  consummate  craftsmanship. 
Even  Thackeray,  with  all  his  cleverness,  with  all 
his  understanding  of  Parisian  life,  did  not  achieve 
the  impossible  feat  of  making  a  wholly  satisfac- 
tory English  translation  of  a  song  of  Beranger's, 
altho  he  twice  attempted  the  'King  of  Yvetot,' 
and  altho  he  did  not  fail  to  bring  over  into  Eng- 
lish not  a  little  of  the  sentiment  and  of  the 
sparkle  of  the  '  Attic.'  In  fact,  it  is  this  ballad  of 
Beranger's  which  satisfies  the  definition  of  fa- 
miliar verse  more  completely  perhaps  than  any 
other  piece  of  that  Epicurean  songster's. 
A  true  lyric,  whether  ballad  or  sonnet  or  elegy, 

160 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

is  not  addrest  to  the  eye  alone;  it  is  ever  intended 
to  be  said  or  sung.  The  songs  of  Beranger  are 
real  songs,  fitted  to  a  tune  already  running  in  the 
head  of  the  lyrist;  and  they  have  in  fact  sung 
themselves  into  being.  The  poems  of  Hugo  and 
Gautier  and  Musset,  even  when  they  are  most 
lyrical,  are  rather  for  recitation  or  reading  aloud ; 
they  are  not  intended  for  the  actual  accompani- 
ment of  music.  Once  indeed  Musset  gave  us  a 
lyric,  which  is  not  only  singable,  but  which 
seems  to  insist  on  an  alliance  with  music.  This 
single  song  is  the  '  Mimi  Pinson  '  with  its  exqui- 
site commingling  of  wit  and  melancholy.  For 
the  most  part  the  stanzas  of  Musset  are  too  full 
of  fire  and  ardor  to  be  classed  as  familiar  verse ; 
they  have  too  rich  a  note  of  passion;  and  despite 
their  brilliance  they  are  of  a  truth  too  sad. 

It  is  only  occasionally  also  that  a  poem  of 
Hugo's  falls  within  the  scope  of  this  inquiry. 
His  was  too  large  an  utterance  for  mere  social 
verse;  and  the  melody  of  his  varied  rhythms  is 
too  vibrating.  His  legends  are  epic  in  their 
breadth;  and  he  lacks  the  unliterary  simplicity 
and  the  vernacular  terseness  of  familiar  verse. 
For  all  his  genius  he  is  deficient  not  only  in  wit 
and  in  humor  but  even  in  the  sense-of-humor; 
and  there  is  not  a  little  truth  in  Heine's  gibe  that 
Victor  Hugo's  "muse  had  two  left  hands." 

From  the  treasury  of  'Enamels  and  Cameos,' 
161 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

there  is  only  the  embarrassment  of  choosing,  as 
no  French  poet  has  written  poems  more  translu- 
cent than  ThSophile  Gautier.  His  is  the  clear 
serenity  of  temper  and  the  unfailing  certainty  of 
stroke  which  reveal  the  master  of  social  verse. 
But  the  French  poet's  invincible  dexterity  is  the 
despair  of  the  translator.  How  render  into 
another  language  the  firmly  chiseled  stanzas  of  a 
lyrist  who  was  enamored  of  the  vocabulary  and 
who  was  ever  wooing  it  ardently  and  success- 
fully ?  As  Mr.  Henry  James  says,  Gautier  "  loved 
words  for  themselves, — for  their  look,  their 
aroma,  their  color,  their  fantastic  intimations." 
Locker-Lampson  accomplished  the  almost  im- 
possible feat  of  finding  English  equivalents  for 
Gautier's  French,  —in  the  first  two  quatrains  of 
'A  Winter  Fantasy'; — but  even  he  thought  it 
best  to  end  his  own  poem  in  his  own  way. 
Probably  the  translation  that  most  triumphantly 
carries  over  into  English  the  finest  essence  of 
Gautier's  art  is  Mr.  Swinburne's  '  We  are  in  love's 
land  to-day.' 


THE  fact  that  a  language  may  lack  a  satisfactory 
word  to  describe  a  certain  thing  is  not  always  a 
proof  that  the  people  using  the  tongue  are  in 
reality  deprived  of  that  for  which  they  may  have 
no  name  of  their  own.  In  English,  for  example, 
162 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

there  is  no  exact  equivalent  for  the  French  ennui; 
—but  who  would  be  so  bold  as  to  question  the 
British  possession  of  this  state  of  mind,  altho  it 
may  be  nameless  in  their  speech  ?  In  French, 
again,  there  is  no  single  word  connoting  all  the 
shades  of  meaning  contained  in  borne]—  and  yet 
no  race  is  more  home-keeping  than  the  French 
and  no  other  nation  has  more  sharply  recognized 
in  its  laws  the  solidarity  of  the  family.  And 
altho  the  most  usual  term  for  familiar  verse  is  v ers 
de  soctitt,  there  is  little  doubt  that  English  liter- 
ature, taking  into  account  both  its  branches, 
British  and  American,  is  at  least  as  rich  in  this 
minor  department  of  poetry  as  French  literature 
may  be.  Indeed,  the  more  carefully  the  social 
verse  of  the  English  language  is  compared  with 
that  of  the  French  language,  the  more  probable 
appears  to  be  the  superiority  of  the  familiar  verse 
in  our  own  tongue,— a  superiority  not  only  in 
abundance  but  also  in  variety. 

The  French,  as  has  been  noted,  have  never 
been  moved  to  bring  together  in  a  single  volume 
the  most  characteristic  of  their  lighter  lyrics;  and 
the  absence  of  an  adequate  anthology  makes  it 
hard  for  a  foreigner  to  assure  himself  that  he  is 
really  acquainted  with  the  best  the  French  have 
to  offer.  But  in  English,  as  it  happens,  there  is 
an  anthology  which  is  wholly  satisfactory;  and 
the  finest  examples  of  familiar  verse,  from  the 
163 


FAMILIAR    VERSE 

beginnings  of  our  literature  down  to  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  were  collected  in  the 
•  Lyra  Elegantiarum '  of  the  late  Frederick  Locker- 
Lampson.  With  this  volume  in  his  hand  it  is 
easy  even  for  the  careless  reader  to  perceive  that 
the  store  of  social  verse  in  England  is  both  ample 
and  many-sided,— despite  the  fact  that  we  are  in 
the  habit  of  borrowing  a  French  name  to  describe 
it. 

By  excluding  the  work  of  all  writers  living 
when  his  volume  was  first  issued,  twoscore  years 
ago,  Locker-Lampson  deprived  his  readers  of  any 
selections  from  his  own  '  London  Lyrics,'  from 
Calverley's  'Fly  Leaves,'  from  Mr.  Lang's  'Bal- 
lades in  Blue  China,'  and  from  Mr.  Austin  Dob- 
son's  '  Vignettes  in  Rime.'  He  was  also  forced 
to  leave  out  nearly  all  that  was  best  in  the  books 
of  our  American  writers,  for  the  leaders  of  Amer- 
ican literature  were  fortunately  surviving  when 
the  British  anthologist  was  at  work  on  his  col- 
lection. But  even  without  making  allowance  for 
these  self-imposed  restrictions,  the  social  verse 
collected  by  Locker-Lampson  is  remarkably  fine; 
its  average  is  surprisingly  high  and  its  range  is 
astonishingly  wide.  And  it  shows  that  English 
literature  from  the  days  of  Skelton  and  Sidney 
down  to  Hood  and  Thackeray  in  the  middle  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  was  illumined  not  only 
by  great  poets  of  lofty  imagination  and  of  sweep- 
164 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

ing  power,  but  also  by  a  host  of  minor  bards 
who  were  able  to  "  express  more  or  less  well  the 
lighter  desires  of  human  nature,"  as  Bagehot 
phrased  it,  "  those  that  have  least  of  unspeakable 
depth,  partake  most  of  what  is  perishable  and 
earthly,  and  least  of  the  immortal  soul."  These 
minor  bards  were  masters  in  their  own  way  and 
they  were  able  to  give  their  little  masterpieces 
the  brevity,  the  brilliancy,  and  the  buoyancy 
which  we  expect  in  the  best  familiar  verse. 

Nor  are  the  minor  bards  the  sole  contributors 
to  'Lyra  Elegantiarum.'  Not  a  few  of  the  most 
characteristic  pieces  in  Locker-Lampson's  collec- 
tion are  from  the  works  of  the  greater  poets,  the 
mighty  songsters  who  are  the  glory  of  our  litera- 
ture. There  is  one  poem  of  Shakspere's,  'O 
Mistress  Mine,  Where  are  you  roaming';  and 
there  are  three  of  Ben  Jonson's,  including  the 
lovely  lyric,  'To  Celia,'— 

Drink  to  me  only  with  thine  eyes, 

And  I  will  pledge  with  mine; 
Or  leave  a  kiss  but  in  the  cup 

And  I  '11  not  look  for  wine. 

There  are  three  selections  from  Dryden,  and 
there  might  easily  have  been  more.  There  is  one 
from  Gray,  —the  delightful  lines  '  On  the  death  of 
a  favorite  cat.'  There  are  five  by  Byron  and  six 
by  Coleridge ;  there  is  one  by  Wordsworth  and 
165 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

another  by  Scott;  and  there  are  thirty-eight  by 
Landor,  "whose  lightest  and  slightest  claim  to 
immortality,"  so  Mr.  Swinburne  has  asserted 
with  his  wonted  and  wanton  exaggeration,  "is 
his  indistinguishable  supremacy  over  all  possible 
competitors  as  a  writer  of  social  or  occasional 
verse,  more  bright,  more  graceful,  more  true  in 
tone,  more  tender  in  expression,  more  deep  in 
suggestion,  more  delicate  in  touch,  than  any  pos- 
sible Greek  or  Latin  or  French  or  English  rivals." 
Not  only  have  the  greater  poets  now  and  again 
condescended  to  the  familiar  verse  in  which  suc- 
cess is  almost  as  rare  as  it  is  in  the  loftier  lyric, 
but  the  masters  of  prose  have  often  been  willing 
to  adventure  themselves  as  songsters  of  society. 
Among  the  dramatists,  Congreve  and  Sheridan, 
of  course,  and  Etherege  and  Vanbrugh  as  well, 
proved  that  upon  occasion  they  could  rime  with 
the  requisite  facility  and  felicity.  Of  the  novel- 
ists, both  Smollett  and  Fielding  more  than  once 
attempted  to  turn  a  couplet  with  playful  intent. 
The  politicians  especially  have  been  prone  to 
seize  on  social  verse  as  a  precious  relaxation  from 
their  sterner  labors;  and  by  no  means  the  least 
interesting  or  the  least  admirable  of  the  examples 
in  Locker-Lampson's  collection  are  the  work  of 
Chesterfield  and  the  Walpoles,  —both  Robert  and 
Horace,  —of  Canning  and  of  Fox.  The  first  Lord 
Houghton  it  was  who  suggested  that  "the  fac- 
166 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

ulty  of  writing  verse  (quite  apart  from  poetic 
genius)  is  the  most  delightful  of  literary  accom- 
plishments, and  it  almost  always  carries  with  it 
the  more  generally  useful  gift  of  writing  good 
prose."  And  it  may  be  that  the  gift  of  writing 
good  prose  carries  with  it  the  likelihood  that  its 
possessor  may  achieve  distinction  in  the  special 
department  of  poetry  where  vernacular  terseness 
is  ever  a  most  valuable  qualification. 

But  what  the  prose-writers  and  the  greater 
poets  have  chanced  to  achieve  in  this  variety  of 
lyric,  charming  as  it  may  be  and  unexpectedly 
exquisite,  is  after  all  a  smaller  contribution  to 
our  store  of  social  verse  than  that  which  we 
have  received  from  the  half-dozen  or  the  half- 
score  lyrists  who  have  won  the  most  of  their 
fame  by  their  essays  in  familiar  verse.  In  any 
history  of  vers  de  soctiU  in  the  British  islands 
attention  must  be  concentrated  on  Herrick  and 
Prior,  on  Cowper  and  Goldsmith,  on  Praed  and 
Hood,  on  Moore  and  Thackeray,  and  on  Locker- 
Lampson  and  Austin  Dobson. 

It  was  in  one  of  his  juvenile  essays  that  Lowell 
called  Herrick  "the  best  and  most  unconscious 
of  the  song- writers  of  his  tuneful  time."  The 
best  he  is,  no  doubt;  but  is  he  really  unconscious  ? 
Is  it  not  rather  that  by  a  perfected  art  he  could 
achieve  spontaneity  and  the  appearance  of  un- 
consciousness ?  Never  do  his  unaffected  lyrics 
167 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

reveal  the  long  labor  of  the  file;  but  who  can 
guess  what  hidden  toil  underlay  the  lightest  of 
his  lovely  trifles  ?  Tho  they  may  never  smell  of 
the  lamp,  but  seem  rather  to  have  flowered  on  a 
spring  morning  and  of  their  own  volition,  it 
would  be  rash  indeed  to  deem  Herrick  only  an 
improviser.  There  is  the  odor  of  an  old-time 
garden  in  his  fragrant  rimes,— an  echo  of  mating 
birds  in  the  liquid  melody  of  his  varied  measures 
Waller's  lines  '  On  a  Girdle,'  Carew's  '  Prayer  to 
the  Wind,'  Suckling's  'Ballad  on  a  Wedding,' 
Lovelace's  lyric  on  '  Going  to  the  Wars,'— none 
of  these  excel  Herrick's  '  Gather  ye  Rose-Buds 
while  ye  may '  in  imponderable  grace  or  in  in- 
comparable ease.  And  nowhere  is  there  a  met- 
rical perfection  more  certain,  a  play  of  fancy  more 
captivating  than  in  the  'Bride-Cake,'  and  in 
'Delight  and  Disorder.' 

In  Prior's  familiar  verse  there  is  more  of  coarse- 
ness than  there  is  in  Herrick's— since  the  latter 
revealed  his  grosser  likings  chiefly  in  his  epi- 
grams. In  Prior,  again,  there  is  a  cynicism  of 
tone,  especially  in  regard  to  woman,  which 
is  far  less  frequent  in  Herrick's  brisk  ballad- 
ing.  But  not  a  few  of  the  foremost  of  Prior's 
pieces  are  as  unstained  as  they  are  unaffected. 
Cowper — and  no  English  poet  ever  had  a  better 
right  to  be  heard  on  this  subject — asserted  that 
"every  man  conversant  with  verse-writing 
1 68 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

knows,  and  knows  by  painful  experience,  that 
the  familiar  style  is  of  all  styles  the  most  difficult 
to  succeed  in.  To  make  verse  speak  the  language 
of  prose,  without  being  prosaic,  to  marshal  the 
words  of  it  in  such  an  order  as  they  might  nat- 
urally take  in  falling  from  the  lips  of  an  extem- 
porary speaker,  yet  without  meanness,  harmoni- 
ously, elegantly,  and  without  seeming  to  dis- 
place a  syllable  for  the  sake  of  the  rime,  is  one  of 
the  most  arduous  tasks  a  poet  can  undertake. 
He  that  could  accomplish  this  task  was  Prior; 
many  have  imitated  his  excellence  in  this  par- 
ticular, but  the  best  copies  have  fallen  far  short 
of  the  original."  A  past  master  Prior  is  of  grace- 
ful gaiety,  of  debonair  raillery,  of  jaunty  au- 
dacity ;  and  yet  he  may  be  found  a  little  lacking 
in  true  feeling  sometimes,  in  tenderness,  if  not 
in  sincerity.  But  there  is  no  denying  his  exhi- 
bition of  all  these  qualities  in  what  must  be  con- 
sidered as  his  most  perfect  poem, —  'To  a  child 
of  quality  five  years  old.' 

Cowper  and  Goldsmith  loom  larger  among  the 
lesser  British  bards  than  some  who  have  been  ad- 
mitted to  the  sacred  heights  solely  because  of 
their  familiar  verse;  yet  it  is  not  by  their  most 
important  works  or  by  their  most  pretentious 
that  they  are  now  best  known  or  best  beloved. 
The  careless  ballad  of  'John  Gilpin  '  is  likely  to 
outlive  the  solid  translation  of  the  '  Iliad  ' ;  and 
169 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

'  Retaliation  '  will  probably  outlast  the  '  Deserted 
Village.'  Humor  and  good  humor  are  found  to- 
gether in  the  familiar  verse  of  both  Cowper  and 
Goldsmith,  unlike  as  were  the  men  themselves. 
Playful  and  cheerful  are  the  '  Jackdaw '  that 
Cowper  took  over  from  the  Latin,  and  the 
'  Elegy  on  Mrs.  Mary  Blaise '  which  Goldsmith 
lightly  borrowed  from  the  French ;  and  this  play- 
ful cheerfulness  is  not  so  common  that  the  verse 
it  characterizes  is  likely  soon  to  slip  into  oblivion. 
Nowadays,  when  more  than  a  century  stretches 
between  us  and  the  old-fashioned  didacticism  of 
Cowper  and  Goldsmith,  the  '  Task '  may  be  left 
unattempted except  by  profest  students  of  poetry ; 
and  the  '  Traveler '  may  rest  from  his  wander- 
ings, reposing  at  last  upon  a  dusty  shelf.  But 
there  is  still  pleasure  to  be  had  in  the  perusal  of 
the  lines,  '  On  the  Death  of  Mrs.  Throckmorton's 
Bullfinch ' ;  and  the  '  Haunch  of  Venison '  still 
provides  a  feast  for  all  who  relish  mischievous 
fun. 

To-day  the  most  ambitious  poems  of  Moore 
seem  sadly  faded  and  outworn;  even  his  songs, 
where  "all  is  beautiful,  soft,  half-sincere,"  as 
has  been  remarked,  "there  is  a  little  falsetto  in 
the  tone;  everything  reminds  you  of  the  draw- 
ing-room and  the  pianoforte."  And  setting 
aside  some  of  the  simplest  and  most  singable  of 
his  '  Irish  Melodies, '  the  best  of  Moore  that  now 
170 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

survives  is  a  little  group  of  society-verses,  dealing 
aptly  and  piquantly  with  the  tinkle  of  the  piano- 
forte and  with  the  chatter  of  the  drawing-room. 
There  is  more  than  a  Dresden-china  prettiness  in 
'  Lesbia  hath  a  charming  eye  '  and  in  '  Farewell!  — 
but  whenever  you  welcome  the  hour.'  There  is 
more  than  mere  sparkle,  there  is  feeling,  super- 
ficial perhaps,  but  sincere  as  far  as  it  goes,  in  his 
verses  'To  Bessy.' 

Hood's  possession  of  pure  pathos  and  also  of 
frisky  humor  cannot  be  denied;  but  more  often 
than  not  he  preferred  to  display  these  qualities 
separately.  Altho  his  verse  can  be  on  occasion 
crisp  and  brisk,  as  in  'I  'm  not  a  single  man  ' 
and  '  Please  to  ring  the  belle,'  he  did  not  often  try 
to  attain  the  rare  balance  of  fun  and  sentiment 
which  is  expected  in  familiar  verse  and  which 
Thackeray  achieved  so  frequently.  There  is  a 
frolicsome  tenderness  and  a  gentle  sparkle  about 
the  '  Mahogany  Tree '  and  about  the  '  Ballad  of 
Bouillabaisse'  which  is  characteristically  Thacke- 
rayan.  The  rhythm  is  free  and  flowing,  the 
rimes  are  ingenious  and  frequent;  and  the  humor 
is  external  while  the  pathos  is  internal.  The 
smile  wreathes  the  corners  of  the  lip  while  the 
tear  is  held  back  beneath  the  eyelid.  Bolder  than 
these  is  '  Peg  of  Limavaddy'  and  deeper  yet  are 
the  lines  on  the  'Album  and  the  Pen.' 

Thackeray   derives   from   Cowper  and    from 
171 


FAMILIAR    VERSE 

Goldsmith;  while  it  is  rather  from  Prior  that 
Praed  descends.  Thackeray's  verses  are  suave 
and  suggestive;  Praed's  are  sometimes  a  little 
hard ;  they  have  a  luster  that  is  almost  metallic, 
and  their  vivacity  is  now  and  then  almost  too 
vigorous.  But  how  certain  the  stroke  is!  How 
sharp  the  wit!  How  happy  the  rime!  His  por- 
traits of  persons  are  etchings  rather  than  minia- 
tures, and  every  feature  is  keenly  limned.  Even 
if  his  manner  is  at  times  a  trifle  mechanical,  his 
antithesis  unduly  insisted  upon,  and  his  epigram 
over-emphatic,  his  wit  is  ever  unflagging,  his 
style  is  ever  pellucid,  and  his  rhythm  is  unfail- 
ingly dextrous  and  flexible.  His  radiance  is  rather 
that  of  the  diamond  than  of  the  running  brook;  but 
the  stone  is  always  clear  cut  and  highly  polished 
and  appropriately  set.  Mr.  Austin  Dobson  has 
singled  out  '  My  Own  Araminta '  as  a  character- 
istic example  of  Praed's  more  sparkling  lyrics 
and  the  '  Vicar '  as  a  satisfactory  representative 
of  his  "more  pensive  character-pieces." 

Mr.  Austin  Dobson  is  one  of  the  two  British 
bards  whose  supremacy  in  familiar  verse  was  un- 
disputed and  indisputable  in  the  final  decade  of  the 
nineteenth  century;  and  the  other  is  Frederick 
Locker-Lampson.  While  Mr.  Dobson  derived  his 
descent  rather  from  Herrick,  and,  it  may  be, 
from  Landor,  Locker-Lampson  had  found  his 
immediate  model  in  Praed;  and  thus  it  happens 
172 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

that  the  '  London  Lyrics '  of  the  latter  fall  more 
completely  within  the  narrower  limits  of  social 
verse  than  do  the  '  Vignettes  in  Rime '  of  the 
former.  Locker-Lampson's  '  Piccadilly  '  and  his 
4  St.  James's  Street '  are  truly  songs  of  society 
with  all  the  elegance  and  all  the  courtesy  the 
fashionable  world  believes  itself  entitled  to  ex- 
pect. Mr.  Austin  Dobson's  '  Molly  Trefusis  ' 
and  his  '  Ladies  of  St.  James's '  are  a  little  larger 
in  their  appeal,  as  tho  the  poet  had  a  broader 
outlook  on  life  and  refused  to  allow  himself  to  be 
confined  wholly  within  the  contracting  circle  of 
society. 

Locker-Lampson  can  be  as  witty  as  Praed, 
tho  his  wit  is  less  obtrusive  and  his  cleverness  is 
less  often  paraded.  He  is  far  more  tender  and 
his  touch  is  more  caressing;  and  yet  it  is  with 
Praed  and  with  Prior  that  he  is  to  be  classed  and 
compared.  Mr.  Austin  Dobson  is  more  of  a 
poet;  he  has  a  lyric  note  of  his  own  purer  and 
deeper  than  any  we  can  catch  in  their  verses; 
and  so  it  is  that  he  is  less  at  ease  than  they  are 
within  the  limitations  of  social  verse  and  that 
his  finest  poems  are  many  of  them  not  fairly  to 
be  considered  as  familiar  verse.  Indeed,  it  is  not 
with  Praed  and  Prior  that  Mr.  Dobson  is  to  be 
measured,  but  rather  with  their  teachers  in  versi- 
fication. 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 
VI 

IT  is  only  toward  the  end  of  the  eighteenth 
century  that  a  division  begins  to  be  observable 
in  the  broadening  stream  of  English  literature 
and  that  it  thereafter  runs  in  two  channels, 
British  and  American.  Of  course,  whatsoever 
is  written  in  the  English  language  belongs  to 
English  literature,  if  only  it  attains  to  the  requisite 
individuality  and  the  needful  elevation;  and  yet, 
almost  as  soon  as  there  came  into  existence  such 
a  thing  as  American  literature,  not  long  after  the 
people  of  the  United  States  had  severed  their 
political  connection  with  Great  Britain,  the  writ- 
ings of  American  authors  revealed  certain  minor 
characteristics  unlike  those  of  the  British  authors 
who  were  their  contemporaries.  It  is  not  easy 
to  declare  precisely  what  it  is  that  differentiates 
the  American  literature  of  the  nineteenth  century 
from  the  British  literature  of  the  same  hundred 
years;  nevertheless  there  are  few  critics  who 
have  failed  to  perceive  the  existence  of  this  differ- 
ence, even  if  the  most  of  them  have  been  unable 
to  analize  it.  As  we  here  in  the  United  States 
do  not  live  under  social  conditions  exactly  like 
those  acceptable  to  our  kin  across  the  sea,  the 
more  closely  our  literature  is  related  to  our  own 
life,  the  more  it  must  differ  from  that  produced 
in  the  British  Isles,  despite  the  use  of  the  same 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

language  and  despite  the  inheritance  of  the  same 
traditions. 

This  difference  between  American  literature 
and  British  literature,  unmistakable  as  it  may  be 
to  many  of  us,  is  never  very  pronounced ;  and  it 
is  probably  far  less  obvious  in  familiar  verse  than 
it  is  in  poetry  of  a  loftier  aspiration.  Perhaps 
this  is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  songsters  of  society 
must  needs  be  bound  by  the  customs  and  the 
conventions  of  well-bred  circles,  which  will  differ 
only  a  little  no  matter  what  the  divergence  of  the 
latitude.  The  manners  of  Murray  Hill  cannot 
vary  very  much  from  those  of  May  fair;  and,  in 
fact,  the  chief  distinction  between  the  familiar 
verse  of  the  two  countries  is  that  the  American 
poets  have  been  less  interested  in  Murray  Hill 
than  the  British  poets  have  been  in  Mayfair.  In 
other  words,  American  vers  de  soctiU  is  less  often 
a  song  of  society  itself  than  is  its  British  rival ;  it  has 
a  little  less  of  the  mere  glitter  of  wit  and  perhaps  a 
little  more  of  the  mellower  tenderness  of  humor. 
It  shrinks  less  from  a  homely  theme;  and  it  does 
not  so  often  seek  that  flashing  sharpness  of  out- 
line, which  Praed  delighted  in  and  which  some- 
times suggests  fireworks  at  midnight. 

As  might  be  supposed,  the  sparse  specimens  of 
familiar  verse  produced  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic, 
while  the  future  United  States  were  still  colonies 
of  Great  Britain,  have  the  usual  characteristics  of 

'75 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

all  colonial  literatures  and  reveal  a  close  imitation 
of  models  imported  from  the  mother-country. 
Even  the  satire  of  the  revolutionary  period,  pointed 
as  it  is  and  piquant,  and  far  more  frequent  than 
is  generally  known,  has  scant  originality  of  form. 
The  '  Battle  of  the  Kegs '  had  British  exemplars ; 
and  'McFingal'  owed  much  to  the  example  of 
Butler  and  of  Churchill.  Except  that  a  plangent 
note  of  personal  experience — and  of  love  of  nature 
also— is  heard  in  it,  now  and  again,  the  vigorous 
verse  of  Freneau  varies  but  little  from  that  pro- 
duced by  his  British  contemporaries.  And  yet 
a  handful  of  familiar  verse  may  be  gleaned  even 
in  this  rather  barren  field ;  and  more  than  one  of 
Freneau's  playful  poems,  the  'Parting  Glass,' 
for  instance,  and  the  cheerful  lines  '  To  a  Katydid,' 
may  keep  company  with  a  few  other  clever  lyrics 
of  this  lighter  sort. 

Joel  Barlow  was  the  chief  of  the  brave  bards 
who  wisht  to  discount  the  future  and  who  sought 
most  ambitiously  to  celebrate  the  coming  glories 
of  this  country;  and  it  is  a  curious  instance  of  the 
irony  of  time  that  while  Barlow's  '  Columbiad' 
is  as  unreadable  to-day— or  at  least  as  little  read 
—as  Timothy  Dwight's  'Conquest  of  Canaan,' 
his  unpretending  rimes  in  honor  of  the  '  Hasty- 
Pudding  '  are  as  fresh  now,  as  lively,  as  amusing, 
as  they  were  on  the  day  they  were  penned.  This 
sole  surviving  specimen  of  Barlow's  poetic  aspir- 
176 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

ation  may  incline  a  little  too  much  toward  the 
mock-heroic  to  fall  completely  within  the  defini- 
tion of  familiar  verse;  and  it  is  a  little  lacking  in 
the  pathos  which  Thackeray  infused  into  the 
'Ballad  of  Bouillabaisse.'  But  the  sincerity  of 
Barlow's  lines  is  as  undeniable  as  their  cleverness, 
their  shrewdness,  and  their  common-sense. 

The  reputation  of  the  '  Croaker  Papers '  of 
Halleck  and  Drake  is  sadly  dimmed  nowadays; 
and  the  reader  in  search  of  true  vers  de  soctiU  is 
sadly  disappointed,  since  he  finds  in  them  only 
•vers  $  occasion  the  interest  of  which  has  departed 
with  the  changing  years.  They  are  "songs  of 
dead  seasons,"  to  use  Mr.  Swinburne's  phrase; 
and  the  most  of  these  jocular  lyrics  of  the  collabo- 
rating bards  which  seemed  so  clever  and  so 
pointed  when  New  York  was  only  a  tiny  town 
on  the  toe  of  Manhattan,  are  seen  to-day  to  be  so 
thickly  studded  with  contemporary  allusions  that 
they  are  readable  only  with  the  aid  of  plentiful 
annotation,— and  what  is  the  zest  of  a  joke  that 
needs  a  footnote  to  be  visible?  In  fact,  nothing 
of  Halleck's  or  Drake's,  whether  written  by  either 
singly  or  by  both  in  collaboration,  has  revealed 
so  vigorous  a  vitality  as  the  charming  and  fan- 
ciful '  Visit  from  St.  Nicholas  '  of  another  New 
Yorker,  their  contemporary,  Clement  C.  Moore. 

The  most  of  the  American  poets  of  a  larger 
reputation  have  condescended  to  the  lighter  lyric 
177 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

upon  occasion,  and  have  written  poems  which 
fulfil  the  triple  qualification  of  brevity,  brilliancy, 
and  buoyancy.  Even  the  austere  Bryant  unbent 
his  brows  for  once  to  tell  in  rime  the  tricksy 
habits  of  the  bobolink;  while  Emerson  chose 
rather  to  address  himself  with  witty  wisdom  and 
glancing  fantasy  'To  the  Humble  Bee.'  The 
grave  and  sedate  Longfellow  was  willing  to  ap- 
pear rather  rollicking,  in  his  swinging  stanzas  in 
praise  of  '  Catawba  Wine  ' ;  and  the  simple  Whit- 
tier  once  again  went  back  to  the  years  of  his 
youth  and  in  '  School-days  '  gave  us  a  picture  as 
clear  as  any  of  Prior's  or  Praed's  and  with  a  ten- 
derness even  more  delicately  suggested.  This 
poem  of  Whittier's  is  evidence  of  the  accuracy 
of  Lowell's  assertion  that  "sentiment  is  intellec- 
tualized  emotion,— emotion  precipitated,  as  it 
were,  in  pretty  crystals  by  the  fancy." 

Lowell's  own  verse  was  too  earnest  and  too 
strenuous  for  him  often  to  be  content  with  this 
sort  of  sentiment,  which  he  called  "  the  delightful 
staple  of  the  poets  of  social  life  like  Horace  and 
Beranger.  ...  It  puts  into  words  for  us  that 
decorous  average  of  feeling  to  the  expression  of 
which  society  can  consent  without  danger  of  be- 
ing indiscreetly  moved.  ...  It  is  the  sufficing 
lyrical  interpreter  of  those  lighter  hours  that 
should  make  part  of  every  man's  day.  .  .  .  True 
sentiment  is  emotion  ripened  by  a  slow  ferment 
178 


FAMILIAR    VERSE 

of  the  mind  and  qualified  to  an  agreeable  temper- 
ance by  that  taste  which  is  the  conscience  of  po- 
lite society."  Had  he  so  chosen,  Lowell  might 
have  been  the  master  of  all  Americans  who  have 
attempted  familiar  verse.  He  seemed  to  have 
every  qualification,  —the  ready  humor,  the  good- 
tempered  wit,  and  the  sincere  sentiment  that 
never  curdled  into  sentimentality.  As  it  is,  he 
has  left  us  a  half  a  dozen,  or,  at  the  most,  half  a 
score  of  lyrics  which  belong  by  the  side  of  the 
best  examples  of  our  social  verse.  '  Without  and 
Within  '  is  perhaps  the  most  widely  known;  and 
'  Auf  Wiedersehen  '  has  been  almost  as  popular. 
It  is  Lowell's  friend  and  fellow-professor  that 
most  critics  would  select  as  the  foremost  Ameri- 
can songster  of  society;  and  this  was  also  the 
opinion  of  Locker-Lampson,  who  declared  in 
1867  that  Holmes  was  "  perhaps  the  best  living 
writer  of  this  species  of  verse. "  Holmes's  poems 
had  most  of  them  an  eighteenth-century  flavor; 
and  they  might  well  have  borne  an  eighteenth- 
century  title,  'Poems  on  Several  Occasions,' 
since  they  had  been  so  largely  evoked  by 
the  current  events  in  Boston,  of  which  proud 
town  he  was  the  loyal  bard.  As  he  himself  put 
it  wittily, 

I  'm  a  florist  in  verse,  and  what  would  people  say, 
If  I  came  to  a  banquet  without  my  bouquet  ? 
179 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

Unfortunately  these  flowers  of  metrical  rhetoric, 
which  seem  so  fresh  when  first  plucked,  fade 
only  too  swiftly  when  the  occasion  has  fallen  out 
of  memory;  and  it  is  not  surprizing  that  the 
most  of  Holmes's  rimes  for  events  at  once  local 
and  transient  are  now  of  lessening  interest.  But 
what  is  really  astonishing  is  that  so  many  of 
them  have  kept  their  vivacity  as  long  as  they 
have.  Of  Holmes's  vers  de  soctiU  as  distin- 
guished from  his  vers  d' occasion,  the  best  are  as 
bright  now  as  ever  they  were.  The  '  Last  Leaf, '  for 
example,  has  not  withered.  In  '  Dorothy  Q,'  again 
in  '  Lending  a  Punch-Bowl, '  and  in  more  than  one 
other  sprightly  and  sparkling  lyric  Holmes  proves 
that  society-verse  may  be,  as  Mr.  Stedman  has 
noted,  "picturesque,  even  dramatic,"  and  that  it 
may  "rise  to  a  higher  degree  of  humor  and  of  sage 
and  tender  thought."  'Contentment'  is  another 
of  Holmes's  essays  in  familiar  verse  which 
is  simply  perfect  in  its  ease  and  its  certainty 
and  its  ironic  humor.  And  the  '  Deacon's  Mas- 
terpiece,'— which  most  of  us  prefer  to  remem- 
ber as  the  'One  Hoss  Shay,'  altho  perhaps  a 
little  too  long  and  a  little  too  satiric  to  be  called 
familiar  verse,  is  one  of  the  minor  masterpieces 
of  American  literature. 

Of  the  American  poets  who  died  before  the 
nineteenth   century  drew  to  an  end,  three  de- 
mand consideration  here, —John  Godfrey  Saxe, 
1 80 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

Eugene  Field,  and  Henry  Cuyler  Bunner.  Of 
these  Saxe  was  much  the  elder,  by  far  the  most 
old-fashioned  in  his  method,  and  also  the  least 
individual.  He  had  borrowed  the  knack  of 
punning  from  Hood,  and  he  had  taken  over  the 
trick  of  antithesis  from  Praed.  If  Mr.  Swinburne 
was  right  in  asserting  that  even  in  the  narrow- 
est form  of  society  lyric,  we  look  "for  more 
spirit  and  versatility  of  life,  more  warmth  of 
touch,  more  fulness  of  tone,  more  vigor  and 
variety  of  impulse  than  we  find  in  Praed,"— 
then  it  is  hard  for  us  to  grant  high  rank 
to  Saxe,  who  was  little  more  than  Praed  once- 
removed.  Sometimes  Saxe  skirts  perilously 
close  to  vulgarity;  sometimes  his  humor  is  no 
better  than  crackling  witticism ;  sometimes  he 
fails  to  achieve  the  elevation  of  tone  which  even 
familiar  verse  ought  ever  to  attain ;  sometimes 
he  lacks  even  the  suggestion  of  that  sentiment 
which  ought  to  underly  the  lyric  of  this  type.  But 
sometimes  his  success  is  evident  and  undeniable, 
as  in  the  '  Mourner  a  la  Mode,'  for  example,  and 
in  'Early  Rising,'  and  more  especially  in  '  Little 
Jerry,' — a  perfect  portrait  deftly  touched  with 
tenderness. 

Eugene  Field  resembled  Saxe  at  least  in  one 

respect, —his    broadly    comic    lyrics    are   more 

abundant  than  his  social  verse.     His  humor  was 

so  spontaneous  that  it  often  became  almost  acro- 

181 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

batic,  reveling  in  the  exuberance  of  its  own  fun. 
He  delighted  in  the  apt  use  of  slang;  and  it  is 
his  indulgence  in  this  fondness  for  vernacular 
freshness  which  must  rule  out  the  '  Truth 
about  Horace,'  from  any  careful  anthology  of 
social  verse,  in  spite  of  its  brilliancy  and  its 
buoyancy.  Field  had  not  only  a  deeper  know- 
ledge of  literature  than  Saxe,  he  had  also  a  wider 
outlook  on  life.  He  had  more  originality,  a 
richer  native  gift  of  metrical  expression,  a  keener 
ingenuity  in  handling  both  rime  and  rhythm,  a 
more  daring  adroitness  of  epithet;  above  all,  he 
had  far  more  feeling,  and  his  sentiment  was 
sincerer  and  sturdier.  '  Little  Boy  Blue  '  is  the 
most  popular  of  Field's  poems,— and  it  is  also 
his  finest  effort  in  the  limited  field  of  familiar 
verse.  '  Thirty-nine '  and  '  Old  Times,  Old 
Friends,  Old  Loves  '  have  the  same  note  of  sen- 
timent, more  playful  but  not  less  pure.  And 
even  '  Apple-Pie  and  Cheese,'  frolicsome  as  it  is 
in  its  rhythm  and  in  its  gaiety,  is  still  restrained 
enough  and  sufficiently  decorous  to  come  within 
the  canon  of  familiar  verse.  Indeed  it  is  curious 
to  note  how  often  good  things  to  eat  and  to 
drink  have  inspired  the  songsters  of  society;  and 
Field's  '  Apple-Pie  and  Cheese '  is  the  nineteenth- 
century  mate  of  Barlow's  eighteenth-century 
'  Hasty-Pudding.' 

Bunner  was  more  truly  a  poet  than  either  Field 
182 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

or  Saxe :  he  could  strike  a  loftier  note  than  they, 
at  once  more  resonant  and  more  appealing ;  his 
humor  is  more  subtly  united  with  his  pathos;  his 
lyre  was  more  obviously  a  winged  instrument 
than  either  of  theirs.  The  '  Way  to  Arcady  '  has 
a  freedom,  an  easy  lightness,  a  graceful  gentle- 
ness, a  simplicity  of  sentiment,  rarely  seen  in 
combination  nowadays,  altho  not  infrequent  in 
the  slighter  songs  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists. 
It  was  in  fact  the  song  of  one  who  had  skirted 
the  coast  of  Bohemia  on  his  way  to  the  forest  of 
Arden,  where  he  was  to  feel  himself  at  home, 
listening  to  the  shepherds  as  they  piped  and 
looking  on  as  the  shepherdesses  danced  in  the 
spring  sunshine.  Not  only  had  Bunner  profited 
by  the  example  of  Herrick  and  of  Suckling,  he 
had  also  felt  the  force  of  Heine's  lyric  irony  and 
he  had  come  under  the  charm  of  Mr.  Austin 
Dobson's  captivating  music.  His  originality  was 
compounded  of  many  simples;  but  when  he 
possest  it  at  last,  it  was  all  his  own.  '  Forfeits ' 
and  'Candor'  are  absolutely  within  the  narrowest 
definition  of  society-verse;  and  they  have  an  in- 
disputable individuality  of  their  own.  So  has  the 
'Chaperon,' with  its  flavor  of  old-time  tender- 
ness. So  has  'One,  Two,  Three,'  with  its  ex- 
quisite certainty  of  touch  and  its  artful  escape 
from  sentimentality. 

Of  the  living  it  is  always  less  easy  to  speak 
183 


with  all  due  restraint  than  it  is  to  criticize  calmly 
those  who  have  gone  before,  leaving  us  only  their 
writings  to  influence  the  pending  decision.  Yet 
it  would  be  absurd  to  omit  here  all  mention  of 
two  of  the  American  masters  of  familiar  verse, 
Mr.  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman  and  Mr.  Thomas 
Bailey  Aldrich.  Theirs  is  never  society-verse  in 
its  narrower  sense,  for  their  lightest  lyrics  are  al- 
ways poetry,  with  no  trace  of  the  striving  and 
with  no  taint  of  the  cheap  smartness  which  only 
too  often  contaminates  mere  society-verse. 
Rather  is  theirs  familiar  verse  in  its  most  refined 
perfection,  such  as  Cowper  would  have  relished. 
Mr.  Aldrich's  '  Nocturne  '  has  a  spontaneity  and  a 
delicate  grace  that  Herrick  would  have  appre- 
ciated; and  Mr.  Stedman's  '  Pan  in  Wall  Street' 
has  a  commingling  of  wit  with  sentiment  that 
recalls  forerunners  as  dissimilar  as  Prior  and 
Theocritus. 

Other  living  American  poets  there  are  not  a 
few  who  have  adventured  now  and  again  in  verse 
of  this  sort,  seemingly  so  easy  and  actually  so 
hard;  and  those  who  may  hereafter  attempt  this 
species  of  poetry  may  be  encouraged  by  the  fact 
that  altho  success  must  needs  be  infrequent,  its  re- 
ward is  as  certain  to-day  as  it  was  nearly  a  score 
of  centuries  ago  when  Pliny  was  writing  to 
Tuscus  that  "  it  is  surprizing  how  much  the  mind 
is  entertained  and  enlivened  by  these  little  poeti- 
184 


FAMILIAR   VERSE 

cal  compositions,  as  they  turn  upon  subjects  of 
gallantry,  satire,  tenderness,  politeness,  and  ev- 
erything, in  short,  that  concern  life,  and  the  af- 
fairs of  the  world." 
(1903.) 


185 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH 
READERS 


[This  paper  was  read  before  the  Modern  Language  Associa- 
tion of  America  in  December,  1908.] 


VIII 
FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

IN  the  leisurely  eighteenth  century,  the  age  of 
ample  prose,  when  every  man  seemed  to  have 
for  his  own  use  all  the  time  there  was,  and  when 
he  was  ever  ready  to  bestow  a  full  share  of  eter- 
nity upon  the  elaboration  of  lucubrations  called 
forth  by  any  topic  that  chanced  to  float  within 
reach, — in  those  easy-going  days,  the  full  and 
proper  title  for  the  casual  suggestions  which  are 
here  to  be  set  down  might  shape  itself  into  some- 
thing not  unlike  this:  "On  a  certain  Ineffec- 
tiveness of  French  Poetry  for  those  Readers  who 
have  English  as  their  Mother-tongue." 

Probably  few  of  us  would  be  prepared  to  dis- 
pute the  statement  that  a  very  large  proportion 
of  those  whose  native  speech  is  English,  and 
who  yet  have  acquired  more  or  less  facility 
in  reading  other  languages  both  ancient  and 
modern,  find  French  poetry  less  satisfying  than 
the  poetry  of  the  Greeks  and  of  the  Latins,  of  the 
Germans  and  of  the  Italians.  Some  of  us  feel 
189 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

this  so  strongly  that  we  are  even  a  little  sur- 
prized to  discover  that  the  French  themselves  do 
not  feel  it  at  all,  and  that  few  of  them  are  pre- 
pared to  admit  any  inferiority  of  thair  poets  or 
any  inadequacy  of  their  language  as  a  medium 
for  poetry.  It  has  seemed  to  some  English 
critics  almost  a  wilful  freakishness,  a  personal 
perversity,  when  they  beheld  a  French  critic  as 
clear-eyed  and  as  open-minded  as  Taine  con- 
trasting Alfred  Tennyson  and  Alfred  de  Musset, 
and  then  concluding  with  the  declaration  that, 
after  all,  he  preferred  Musset. 

Brunetiere  was  unable  to  discover  any  sufficient 
reason  for  the  fact  he  admitted  ungrudgingly,  that 
altho  French  prose  conquered  all  the  nations  of 
Europe,  French  poetry  had  been  unable  to  win 
a  firm  foothold  outside  of  the  confines  of  its 
own  language.  That  the  French  are  the  modern 
masters  of  prose  is  undeniable.  Why  are  they 
not  also  the  masters  of  poetry?  Why  is  it  that  a 
list  of  the  chief  French  authors,  whether  this  roll- 
call  extends  to  a  dozen  or  a  score  or  a  hundred, 
would  be  illuminated  chiefly  by  the  names  of 
prose-writers,  whereas  a  corresponding  list  of 
authors  using  the  English  language  would  shine 
with  a  very  large  preponderance  of  the  poets? 

Perhaps  it  is  not  begging  the  question  to  lay 
on  the  French  language  the  blame  for  certain  of 
the  deficiencies  that  we  think  we  detect  in 
190 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

French  poetry.  Perhaps  it  is  not  unprofitable  to 
remind  ourselves  again  that  a  language  must  of 
necessity  resemble  the  people  who  speak  it,  and 
who  have  molded  it  instinctively  to  their  own 
necessities  and  to  their  own  natures.  "There 
is  room  for  a  very  interesting  work  which  should 
lay  open  the  connexion  between  the  languages 
and  the  manners  of  nations," — so  wrote  Gibbon 
in  one  of  the  frequent  notes  of  his  monumental 
history,  the  first  volume  of  which  appeared  in 
the  year  when  the  English-speaking  race  was 
split  into  two  peoples.  The  "  very  interesting 
work  "  which  the  great  historian  suggested  has 
not  yet  been  written.  But  jts  theme  has  at- 
tracted the  attention  of  many  an  acute  critic;  and 
it  would  be  easy  to  collect  a  sheaf  of  suggestions 
likely  to  be  useful  to  the  investigator  who  should 
undertake  the  task.  For  example,  the  Danish 
scholar,  Professor  Jespersen,  thinks  that  English 
is  essentially  a  virile  speech,  having  about  it 
little  that  is  feminine  or  childish.  Lowell  was 
unwittingly  commenting  on  the  race  that  speaks 
German  when  he  declared  that  he  found  in  that 
language  "  sentences  in  which  one  sets  sail  like 
an  admiral  with  sealed  orders,  not  knowing 
where  he  is  going  till  he  is  in  mid-ocean." 

In  the  language  of  the  French  we  find  the 
qualities  which  characterize  the  race — the  social 
instinct,  the  logic,  the  regard  for  proportion  and 
191 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

order,  the  inherited  Latin  tradition — all  charac- 
teristics which  make  for  prose  and  for  the  most 
pellucid  prose,  altho  some  of  them  are  more  or 
less  hostile  to  poetry,  and  especially  to  lyric 
poetry.  On  the  other  hand,  a  certain  lack  of  re- 
straint discoverable  in  the  writings  of  the  stock 
that  speaks  English,  an  excessive  individualism, 
a  superabundant  energy  that  transmutes  itself 
easily  into  imagination — these  are  all  qualities 
which  make  for  poetry,  and  more  particularly  for 
lyric  poetry.  It  is  true  also  that  they  are  quali- 
ties which  make  against  prose  in  its  finest  per- 
fection of  artistic  ease  and  of  persuasive  sanity. 
It  is  not  by  accident  that  English  literature  has 
had  characteristic  figures  like  Carlyle,  with  his 
humorous  contortions,  and  like  Ruskin,  with  his 
flamboyant  bullying.  Nor  is  it  by  chance  only 
that  French  literature  in  the  same  century  had 
Sainte-Beuve  and  Renan  and  Taine,  dealing 
soberly  with  themes  closely  akin  to  those  which 
the  two  British  writers  chose  to  handle  vehe- 
mently and  violently. 

It  was  a  Frenchman — Rivarol — who  declared 
that  what  was  not  clear  was  not  French.  It 
was  another  Frenchman — Renan — who  asserted 
that  his  fellow-countrymen  cared  to  express 
only  what  was  clear,  altho  "the  most  important 
truths,  those  relating  to  the  transformation  of 
life,  are  not  clear;  one  perceives  them  only  in  a 
192 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

kind  of  half-light."  Clarity  is  an  essential  of  the 
best  prose;  but  the  subtlest  and  most  sugges- 
tive poetry  can  get  along  without  it.  In  some 
of  Shelley's  loveliest  lyrics,  for  instance,  the 
logic  is  a  little  doubtful,  and  the  exact  meaning 
is  not  beyond  dispute.  The  very  precision  of 
the  French  vocabulary,  with  its  sharp-edged 
words,  bare  of  all  penumbra,  makes  it  difficult 
for  those  who  have  to  use  it  as  a  medium  for 
poetry  to  express  the  vague  phases  of  emotion 
in  the  formative  moods  of  feeling.  Here  seems 
to  be  a  superiority  of  the  Teutonic  tongues,  in 
that  they  can  render  more  readily  the  saturated 
solution  of  emotion  before  it  is  precipitated, 
whereas  the  various  inheritors  of  the  Latin  lan- 
guage can  reproduce  rather  the  sharp  transpar- 
ency of  the  crystal. 

A  colleag  of  mine  at  Columbia,  when  he  was 
a  student  at  Berlin,  came  to  the  reading  of  the 
psychologic  studies  of  M.  Paul  Bourget  after  he 
had  been  steeping  himself  in  German  philoso- 
phy, and  he  discovered  that  the  French  author 
was  struggling  valiantly  to  express  in  his  own 
tongue  the  rather  nebulous  ideas  absorbed  from 
this  same  German  philosophy.  In  the  transfer- 
ence of  the  German  thought  into  the  French 
language  there  was  a  gain  in  clarity,  no  doubt, 
but  there  was  also  the  sacrifice  of  a  hazy  but  far- 
reaching  suggestiveness  which  might  be  an 
193 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

agent  of  imaginative  stimulation.  And  what  is 
poetry,  after  all,  but  another  expression  of  phil- 
osophy? As  Whitney  once  phrased  it,  "words 
are  not  the  exact  models  of  ideas;  they  are 
merely  signs  for  ideas,  at  whose  significance  we 
arrive  as  well  as  we  can."  If  the  words  of  a 
language  are  sharply  precise,  they  can  best  sig- 
nify those  ideas  which  have  a  precision  equally 
acute.  It  was  Rivarol,  again,  who  declared  that 
in  French  "  the  imagination  of  the  poet  is  ar- 
rested also  by  the  circumspect  genius  of  the 
language." 

Not  only  is  the  French  language  sharper  than 
any  one  of  the  several  Teutonic  tongues, — and 
thereby  better  fitted  for  exposition,  for  the  con- 
veying of  information,  for  criticism,  for  logic,  for 
science,  and  in  general  for  all  the  purposes  of 
prose, — but  it  is  also  less  musical,  less  accentual, 
more  monotonous.  It  is  a  nasal  speech,  and  its 
tones  are  less  beautiful  than  those  of  its  Latin 
sisters,  Italian  and  Spanish,  studded  with  open 
vowels, — less  beautiful  really  than  those  of  Eng- 
lish when  our  Northern  language  is  handled  by 
a  master  of  sounds  who  knows  how  to  evoke 
the  melody  of  which  it  is  capable.  No  French 
poet  has  been  able  to  make  his  words  sing  them- 
selves into  the  memory  more  certainly  than 
Victor  Hugo;  and  yet  even  that  virtuoso  of  the 
lyric  has  left  us  few  stanzas  sustained  by  the 
194 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

haunting  harmony  which  lifts  up  many  of  the 
lines  of  Tennyson.  Even  Poe,  whose  equip- 
ment is  meager  enough,  even  if  his  accomplish- 
ment is  surprizing,  can  on  occasion  achieve  a 
mastery  of  mere  sound,  denied  to  Hugo  despite 
all  his  marvelous  native  gift  and  all  his  consum- 
mate craftsmanship  in  compelling  words  to  do 
his  bidding. 

French  verse  seems  to  be  curiously  dependent 
on  its  rimes  for  its  structure.  In  his  little  trea- 
tise on  the  art  of  versification,  Banville  is  frank 
in  avowing  this  and  in  setting  forth  plainly  the 
importance  of  the  principle.  It  is  significant 
that  blank  verse  has  never  been  able  to  establish 
itself  in  French  poetry;  and  French  prose  is 
almost  free  from  those  passages  of  unconscious 
blank  verse  such  as  Dickens  fell  into  when  he 
wanted  to  emphasize  the  pathos  of  his  senti- 
mental death-beds.  Without  its  pairs  of  rimes 
the  poetry  of  the  French  is  barely  distinguishable 
from  prose — at  least  by  a  foreign  ear.  And  as  a 
result  the  poets  of  France  have  centered  their  at- 
tention on  rime,  and  have  forced  from  it  possi- 
bilities unattained  as  yet  by  the  poets  who  use 
the  accented  Teutonic  tongues.  No  dextrous 
manipulator  of  English  has  yet  extracted  from 
his  rimes  alone  the  sustaining  effects  which 
Heredia  wrought  into  his  lustrous  sonnets  by 
the  artful  choice  and  contrast  of  his  terminal  syl- 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

lables.  Nor  has  any  lyrist  of  our  language  ever 
juggled  with  iridescent  rimes  as  Victor  Hugo  was 
wont  to  do,  dazzling  the  eyes  of  the  reader  with 
the  incomparable  brilliance  of  his  selection. 

The  French  poets  are  forced  to  rely  largely  on 
their  rimes  because  their  language  is  in  a  way 
monotonous, — if  not  absolutely  devoid  of  accent. 
There  is  no  denying  that  it  is  far  less  accentual 
than  German  or  English.  Nisard  declared  that 
French  was  unique  among  all  languages  in  that 
it  was  wholly  without  accent;  and  he  even 
maintained  that  this  deficiency  helped  to  fit  the 
language  for  universal  use,  since  accent  was 
what  was  most  individual  in  human  speech. 
And  here  we  have  another  reason  why  French 
poetry  is  less  satisfying  to  our  ears,  attuned  to 
the  bolder  rhythmic  swing  of  the  Teutonic 
meters.  Here,  indeed,  is  an  obvious  disability 
of  the  French,  which  puts  their  poets  at  an  in- 
disputable disadvantage.  Emotion  is  accentual, 
just  as  all  nature  is  also.  The  instinctive  cries 
of  primitive  man  are  undulatory.  The  spontane- 
ous expression  of  feeling  rises  and  falls,  like  the 
waves  of  the  sea.  There  is  a  cadence  in  the 
crooning  of  the  mother  over  her  babe  asleep  in 
the  cradle,  as  there  is  also  in  the  bitter  wailing 
of  the  tribe  over  its  dead.  In  so  far  as  the  French 
language  has  a  barrenness  of  accent,  and  a  fun- 
damental monotony  of  syllabic  utterance,  and  in 
196 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

so  far  as  it  tends  to  require  its  lyrists  to  abstain 
from  stress,  from  undulation,  it  is  deprived  of  an 
emotional  resource,  of  a  method  of  appeal  to  the 
soul  through  the  ear,  which  has  been  potent  in 
poetry  since  the  far-off  ages  when  primitive  man 
had  not  yet  discovered  the  utility  of  prose. 

It  is  not  safe  to  accept  Nisard's  assertion  that 
the  French  language  is  absolutely  without  ac- 
cent. But  it  is  fair  enough  to  suggest  that  the 
rhythmic  variety  of  French  is  far  more  subtle, 
far  less  obvious,  than  that  existing  in  any  of  the 
Teutonic  tongues.  In  giving  up  a  more  plainly 
markt  accent,  a  rhythm  perceptible  to  the  ear 
accustomed  to  the  bolder  alternations  of  stress 
more  easily  measured  in  our  own  speech,  the 
French  have  shorn  their  language  of  an  emotional 
instrument,  of  a  physical  advantage,  preserved 
for  the  use  of  the  poets  of  almost  every  modern 
tongue.  Sometimes  the  French  insist  on  the 
equality  of  every  syllable  in  a  line,  and  some- 
times they  profess  to  be  able  to  detect  a  play  of 
accent  imperceptible  to  the  foreign  ear  habituated 
to  the  marching  rhythm  of  other  languages. 
For  the  most  part,  their  own  writers  have  failed 
to  see  how  large  this  loss  is,  in  thus  surrender- 
ing what  was  the  birthright  of  primitive  man. 
Unfamiliar  with  this  emotional  instrument,  they 
do  not  perceive  that  its  absence  enfeebles  the 
appeal  which  their  poetry  makes  on  foreign  ears. 
197 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

Naturally  enough,  they  themselves  do  not  miss 
that  which  they  have  never  possest. 

It  was  the  wise  Mommsen  who  called  Cice- 
ronianism  a  problem  which  is  part  of  "that 
greater  mystery  of  human  nature — language  and 
the  effect  of  language  on  the  mind."  And  it 
was  the  shrewd  Bagehot  who  asserted  that  there 
was  "a  certain  intimate  essence  of  national 
meaning  which  is  untransmutable  as  good 
poetry.  Dry  thoughts  are  cosmopolitan,  but 
the  delicate  associations  of  language  which  ex- 
press character,  the  traits  of  speech  which  mark 
the  man,  differ  in  every  tongue,  so  that  there 
are  not  even  cumbrous  circumlocutions  that  are 
equivalent  in  another."  This  is  one  of  the  rea- 
sons why  the  best  translation  can  never  be 
more  than  an  inferior  substitute  for  the  original. 
No  one  can  really  feel  the  inner  meaning  of  a 
poem  until  he  has  conquered  an  insight  into  the 
language  in  which  it  sang  itself  into  being. 
And  even  when  the  reader  has  gained  this  es- 
sential mastery  of  the  foreign  speech,  it  remains 
foreign,  after  all;  it  can  never  be  more  than  an 
academic  accomplishment;  it  can  never  make  the 
intimate  appeal  of  the  songs  originally  phrased 
in  the  mother-tongue.  As  Sidney  Lanier  de- 
clared poetically,  every  word  of  a  poem  "is 
like  the  bright  head  of  a  comet  drawing  behind 
it  a  less  luminous  train  of  vague  associations, 
198 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

which  are  associations  only  to  those  who  have 
used  such  words  from  infancy." 

This  remark  of  Lanier's  may  help  us  to  grasp 
a  third  reason  why  Hugo  and  Musset  are  less 
satisfying  than  Goethe  or  Heine  to  us  who  have 
English  for  our  native  speech, — a  reason  to  be 
seized  only  when  we  recall  the  lasting  effects  of 
the  impress  of  French  upon  English  when  our 
language  was  yet  in  its  plastic  youth.  The  Nor- 
man conquest  brought  about  a  mingling  in  our 
tongue  of  French  words  with  the  ruder  vocables 
of  Anglo-Saxon  origin;  and  English  has  been 
free  ever  since  to  enrich  itself  from  a  twofold 
store,  taking  from  the  Romance  stock  with  the 
right  hand  and  from  the  Teutonic  with  the  left. 
As  a  result  of  this  admixture  the  vocabulary  of 
English  is  probably  ampler  now  than  that  of 
any  other  language. 

It  is  true,  of  course,  that  there  is  a  large  in- 
fusion of  Romance  words  in  modern  German 
speech,  as  there  is  also  a  large  infusion  of  Teu- 
tonic words  in  modern  French  speech;  but 
neither  French  nor  German  has  a  double  vocabu- 
lary for  ordinary  use  as  English  has.  Now,  if  we 
classify  the  English  words  in  ordinary  use  into 
two  groups,  the  first  embracing  what  may  be 
called  the  primary  words,  those  which  we  use 
instinctively  in  the  hour  of  need  and  at  all  other 
moments  of  tense  emotion,  and  the  second  em- 
199 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

bracing  the  secondary  words,  those  with  which 
we  are  equally  familiar,  no  doubt,  but  which  do 
not  rise  as  readily  to  our  lips, — if  we  undertake 
this  classification,  we  know  in  advance  that  the 
larger  proportion  of  the  primary  words  will  be- 
long to  the  Teutonic  stock,  and  that  a  larger  pro- 
portion of  the  secondary  words  will  belong  to  the 
Romance  stock.  As  Herbert  Spencer  recorded, 
"a  child's  vocabulary  is  almost  wholly  Saxon." 
And  the  same  acute  observer  also  declared  that 
"the  earliest  learnt  and  oftenest  used  words  will, 
other  things  being  equal,  call  up  images  with  less 
loss  of  time  and  energy  than  their  later  learnt 
synonyms." 

To  call  up  images  is  a  chief  purpose  of  the 
poet;  and  he  will  succeed  in  English  largely  in 
proportion  to  his  choice  of  the  primary  words, 
chiefly  of  Teutonic  descent,  and  to  his  skill  in 
extracting  from  them  all  their  essential  sugges- 
tion. When  he  prefers  the  secondary  words,  of 
Romance  origin  mostly,  he  is  likely  to  seem  less 
direct,  less  vigorous,  and  even  less  sincere. 
But  if  these  verbal  characteristics  so  impress  us 
in  the  lyrics  of  our  own  language,  in  all  proba- 
bility they  will  so  impress  us  also  in  the  verses 
of  foreign  poets.  Thus  it  is  that  we  who  have 
English  for  our  mother-tongue  find  in  German 
poetry  a  free  use  of  Teutonic  terms  closely 
akin  to  our  own  primary  words;  and  we  cannot 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

help  finding  in  French  poetry  that  Romance 
vocabulary  which  recalls  our  own  secondary 
words,  to  us  always  more  or  less  inferior  in 
emotional  suggestion.  Both  in  French  and  in 
German  the  poets  are  using  words  which  are 
primary  to  them,  but  in  consequence  of  our 
double  vocabulary  only  the  words  of  the  Ger- 
man poets  seem  primary  to  us.  The  words  of 
the  French  poets  must  necessarily  appear  to  us 
as  secondary, — that  is  to  say,  as'less  direct,  less 
vigorous,  and  even  as  less  sincere  than  the  words 
of  the  German  poets. 

To  say  this,  of  course,  is  not  to  pass  any  ulti- 
mate condemnation  on  French  poetry,  but  only 
to  explain  one  reason  why  it  is  less  effective  to 
those  who  speak  English  than  it  is  to  those  who 
speak  Italian  or  Spanish.  To  us  the  homely  talk 
of  the  hearth,  the  stuff  out  of  which  the  simplest 
poetry  is  made,  is  largely  Teutonic;  but  when 
an  inheritor  of  the  Latins  handles  this  same  stuff 
he  cannot  command  other  than  Romance  voca- 
bles. The  French  lyric  which  appears  to  us  in- 
direct and  ineffective,  simply  because  the  poet 
must  perforce  employ  words  which  seem  to  us 
secondary,  will  be  satisfying  to  a  Frenchman,  to 
whom  these  same  words  are  primary;  and  to 
him  it  may  appeal  as  a  masterpiece  of  vigorous 
sincerity. 

Many  of  those  who  are  best  fitted  to  appreci- 
201 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

ate  the  finer  qualities  of  French  literature  have 
always  felt  that  there  was  a  lack  of  fairness  in 
Matthew  Arnold's  trick  of  comparing  poetical 
fragments  in  French  and  in  English,  to  the  fore- 
seen disadvantage  of  the  foreign  lyrist.  The  vic- 
tory was  a  little  too  easy  to  be  quite  worth  while; 
and  it  failed  to  carry  conviction  even  to  those 
who  were  willing  enough  to  admit  that  French 
poetry  did  not  satisfy  them.  Yet  this  French 
poetry  does  satisfy  the  capable  and  accomplished 
critics  of  France,  a  land  where  criticism  is  culti- 
vated as  a  fine  art.  May  not  this  divergence  of 
opinion  be  due  to  the  two  causes  here  indi- 
cated ?  First,  to  the  fact  that  French  verse  is  far 
less  accentual  than  the  verse  of  any  of  the  Teu- 
tonic tongues,  and  that  therefore  it  is  emotionally 
feebler  to  us  who  are  accustomed  to  the  stronger 
beats  of  our  own  stanzas;  and,  second,  to  the 
fact  that  the  French  words  most  needed  by  the 
poet  seem  to  us  who  speak  English  secondary, 
less  direct,  and  therefore  less  effective,  altho 
these  very  words  are  primary  to  the  French 
poet  himself  and  to  his  French  readers.  This 
second  disadvantage  applies  more  particularly 
to  the  poetry  of  the  simpler  emotions.  But  the 
poetry  of  a  more  sweeping  imagination  is  also 
more  or  less  unsatisfactory  to  us  because  the 
marvelous  clarity  of  the  French  language  de- 
prives the  poet  who  works  in  it  of  a  power  of 

202 


FRENCH  POETS  AND  ENGLISH  READERS 

indefinite  suggestion  possible  to  the  poets  who 
have  English  or  German  or  Greek  for  their 
mother-tongue. 

It  remains  only  to  be  noted  that  these  two 
disadvantages  of  French  poetry  are  neither  of 
them  discoverable  in  Italian  poetry  or  in  Span- 
ish,— or  at  least  not  discoverable  to  the  same 
extent.  In  the  first  place,  both  these  other  Ro- 
mance languages  are  more  obviously  rhythmic, 
with  accentual  systems  easily  perceptible  to  the 
ears  attuned  to  Teutonic  alternations  of  stress. 
And  in  the  second  place,  the  Romance  words  in 
English  are  derived  most  of  them  directly  from 
the  French,  whereas  the  Italian  and  Spanish 
forms  of  the  same  word  are  often  so  different 
from  our  secondary  words  that  they  need  an 
effort  of  perception  and  so  evoke  the  primary 
emotions,  rather  than  the  secondary,  which  are 
called  forth  by  the  corresponding  French  words. 
It  is  true  also  that  clarity  is  not  the  chief  charac- 
teristic of  either  Italian  or  Spanish,  as  it  is  of 
French. 

(1908.) 


203 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 


IX 

A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

THERE  is  an  obvious  significance  in  the  fact 
that  a  score  of  years  ago,  altho  Renan  and 
Taine  were  still  alive,  the  most  interesting  per- 
sonalities in  French  literature  were  three  story- 
tellers, Zola,  Daudet  and  Maupassant,  whereas 
today  the  chief  figures  are  two  critics,  M.  Jules 
Lemaitre  and  M.  Anatole  France,  disciples  both 
of  them  rather  of  the  caressing  Renan  than  of 
the  more  invigorating  Taine.  It  is  true  that 
both  of  these  have  also  adventured  themselves 
into  story-telling  and  into  play-writing,  but 
nevertheless  their  tales,  their  novels  and  their 
dramas  are  essentially  critical  in  temper.  M. 
France  has  been  more  persuasive  and  prolific 
than  M.  Lemaitre  in  the  creation  of  character; 
and  yet  he  is  also  more  distinctly  critical  in  his 
abiding  attitude.  He  has  analized  books,  and 
men,  and  society  at  large,  and  humanity  itself; 
and  never  does  he  let  the  scalpel  and  microscope 
drop  from  his  hands.  He  is  fundamentally  a 
207 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

critic,  even  in  that  lower  and  commoner  mean- 
ing of  the  word  which  limits  criticism  to  fault- 
finding. His  criticism  is  incessant,  dissolving 
and  destructive.  He  is  diligent  in  proving  all 
things;  and  at  the  end  of  his  inquiry  he  finds 
little  or  nothing  true  enough  for  him  to  hold  fast. 
A  familiar  French  proverb  declares  that  to 
understand  everything  is  to  pardon  everything; 
and  M.  France  understands  everything, — except 
perhaps  those  very  commonplace  virtues  which 
sustain  the  social  fabric;  and  he  pardons  every- 
thing, virtues  as  well  as  vices,  with  an  equal 
toleration  and  with  an  equally  disintegrating 
irony.  He  is  the  most  richly  cultivated  of  critics 
and  the  least  academic.  He  has  absorbed  the 
essence  of  traditional  standards  while  discarding 
all  their  non-essentials.  His  sympathetic  appre- 
ciation is  as  unfailing  as  his  intelligence  is  open; 
indeed,  his  intelligence  is  so  open  that  it  has 
rejected  all  formulas,  ethic  as  well  as  esthetic. 
He  is  a  frank  pagan,  with  a  paganism  thru  which 
Christianity  has  filtered  leaving  only  an  impalpa- 
ble deposit.  He  is  full  of  compassion  for  the 
spectacle  of  human  folly  and  of  human  misery; 
but  his  compassion  is  sustained  by  little  hope 
for  the  dawn  of  a  better  day.  To  him  life  is  a 
tragic  farce.  He  is  a  pessimistic  anarchist,  who 
is  master  of  an  incomparable  style,  melodious 
and  harmonious,  caressing  and  picturesque. 
208 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

He  has  the  faculty  of  ever  finding  the  fit  phrase 
for  his  thought,  at  once  beautiful  in  itself  and 
exact  in  its  precision.  His  style  is  the  style  of 
a  scholar  who  is  also  a  man  of  the  world, — an 
exquisite  style,  rich  in  thought  and  ripe  in  color, 
subtle  and  supple,  fluid  and  limpid, — a  style  as 
sinuous  and  enveloping  as  the  irony  which  sup- 
ports its  iridescence.  His  writing  is  always  de- 
lightful even  if  it  is  often  disconcerting. 

There  are  three  strains  intertwined  in  the 
modern  Frenchman — Celt  and  Latin  and  Nor- 
man; and  all  three  reveal  themselves  in  M. 
France.  He  has  the  gay  and  girding  humor  of 
the  Celt,  the  order  and  the  traditional  reserve  of 
the  Latin,  and  the  sturdy  obstinacy  of  the  Nor- 
man. The  inconsistencies  discoverable  in  his 
writings  may  be  ascribed  to  the  wrestling  of 
these  three  diverse  inheritances.  The  perfect 
proportion  and  the  artistic  harmony  of  such  a 
brief  tale  as  the  '  Procurator  of  Judea ' — one 
of  the  marvelous  masterpieces  of  the  short- 
story — may  be  credited  to  the  Latin  tradition, 
while  the  deliberate  formlessness  of  the  four 
consecutive  volumes  of  '  Contemporary  History' 
(in  which  M.  Bergeret  is  the  salient  character) 
is  Celtic  in  its  lawless  rejection  of  all  the  ac- 
cepted canons  of  construction.  The  earlier 
short-story  has  the  severe  simplicity  of  a  Greek 
intaglio,  the  flawless  perfection  of  a  gem  carved 
209 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

by  a  consummate  artist,  while  the  later  and  larger 
narrative  is  deliberately  projected  as  a  sprawling 
succession  of  casual  episodes,  each  of  them  sig- 
nificant in  itself;  it  is  a  thing  wholly  without 
precedent,  a  work  of  art  without  form,  altho 
never  void,  and  in  the  looseness  of  the  thread 
which  unites  its  parts  it  can  be  likened  only  to 
the  wanton  laxity  of  Sterne. 

M.  France's  occasional  kinship  to  Sterne  is 
evident  enough,  especially  in  his  occasional  in- 
sistence upon  the  coarser  aspects  of  human  na- 
ture; but  the  French  writer's  scholarship  is  never 
second-hand,  as  the  Englishman's  was  only  too 
often.  Disraeli  once  declared  that  he  had  been 
born  in  a  library;  and  M.  Anatole  France  was 
even  more  fortunate  in  that  he  was  born  in  an 
old  book-shop,  the  shelves  of  which  were  inces- 
santly replenishing  themselves  as  no  library  is 
likely  to  do.  He  grew  up  in  an  atmosphere  of 
old  things, — old  books,  old  bindings,  old  prints. 
He  has  a  solid  education ;  and  he  early  acquired 
genuine  erudition.  He  learnt  in  his  youth  to 
distinguish  the  good  edition — the  one  with  the 
misprint  on  the  title-page.  He  absorbed  the 
Greek  lyrists  of  the  Alexandrian  decadence  as 
well  as  the  French  philosophers  of  the  iconoclas- 
tic eighteenth  century. 

A  child  of  Renan,  he  is  a  grandchild  of  Vol- 
taire, altho  he  has  less  arrogance  than  the  former 

2IO 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

and  less  aridity  than  the  latter.  The  influence  of 
Renan  is  indisputable,  and  yet  the  kinship  with 
Voltaire  is  more  obvious.  We  find  in  M.  France 
the  intellectual  agility,  the  easy  playfulness,  the 
mordant  wit,  the  corrosive  irony,  and  even  the 
occasional  fondness  for  unclean  innuendo  which 
characterize  Voltaire,  who  also  was  primarily  a 
critic,  applying  touchstone  and  acid  to  every  ac- 
cepted belief.  As  Voltaire  came  forward  in  a 
manly  fashion  in  defense  of  Galas,  so  M.  France 
stood  forth  boldly  in  the  dark  days  of  the 
Dreyfus  iniquity  and  did  his  best  to  bring  his 
fellow-citizens  back  to  the  path  of  sanity ; — and 
here,  it  may  be  noted,  his  attitude  was  wiser  and 
more  courageous  than  that  of  M.  Lemaitre.  And 
it  was  from  Voltaire  that  M.  France  borrowed 
the  formula  of  the  brief  philosophic  story,  the 
pertinent  apolog,  as  significant  as  a  primitive 
folk-tale.  Close  as  may  be  his  affiliation  with 
Voltaire,  he  throws  back  also  to  Montaigne  in 
his  frankness  of  speech  and  in  his  willingness 
to  make  the  best  of  the  world  while  thinking 
none  too  well  of  it. 

He  was  earliest  made  known  in  the  United 
States  by  the  candid  and  delicious  narrative 
called  the  'Crime  of  Sylvestre  Bonnard,'  magi- 
cally rendered  into  English  by  Lafcadio  Hearn, 
who  was  sympathetically  gifted  to  comprehend 
the  stylist  he  was  translating.  And  none  of  M. 

211 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

France's  books  is  better  fitted  to  win  him  a  wel- 
come from  the  English-speaking  peoples.  Its 
charm  is  all  its  own;  and  it  represents  its  author 
at  his  best,  before  his  irony  had  begun  to  corrode 
his  own  belief  in  mankind.  It  is  a  tender  tale, 
human  and  humane,  urban  and  urbane,  touched 
with  sentiment  and  tinged  with  romance.  It  is 
bathed  in  melancholy,  refreshing  and  never  sad- 
dening. It  does  not  leave  a  bad  taste  in  the 
mouth,  as  the  'Red  Lily'  does.  This  more 
elaborate  and  more  sophisticated  fiction  is  un- 
failingly clever,  as  it  could  not  help  being;  but 
it  may  be  dismist  as  almost  a  failure  in  spite  of 
all  its  cleverness.  It  seems  to  have  been  written 
in  rivalry  with  M.  Paul  Bourget's  pretentiously 
cosmopolitan  novels  of  fashionable  intrigue. 
But  the  significant  difference  is  that  M.  Bourget 
takes  his  high-born  puppets  seriously;  and  this 
is  just  what  M.  France  could  not  do. 

In  writing  the  'Red  Lily'  he  seemed  some- 
how to  be  working  against  the  grain;  and 
perhaps  the  same  thing  might  be  said  of  his 
'Histoire  Comique,'  in  which  his  model  is  rather 
Maupassant  than  Bourget.  Yet  this  later  novel 
is  far  less  imitative  and  far  more  spontaneous 
than  the  earlier,  even  if  it  reveals  the  wilful  twist 
of  indurated  pessimism.  Its  humor,  playful 
enough,  is  also  a  little  grim ;  and  it  has  even  a 
tincture  of  the  gruesome.  It  is  veracious  in  its 

212 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

own  way,  but  it  does  not  tell  the  whole  truth ; 
and  thus  it  provides  us  with  only  a  distorted 
vision  of  life.  It  lacks  the  paradoxical  playful- 
ness that  flashes  and  ripples  thru  the  '  Rotis- 
serie  de  la  Reine  Pedauque,'  a  narrative  as  es- 
thetically  exhilarating  as  it  is  ethically  unsettling. 
And  there  is  the  same  dexterity  of  craftsmanship, 
the  same  appalling  cleverness,  in  the  still  later 
'Island  of  Penguins,'  the  most  disenchanted  of 
all  its  author's  books,  recalling  the  last  part  of 
'Gulliver's  Travels '  in  the  blank  inhumanity  of 
its  chill  negation.  Here  M.  France  in  the  twen- 
tieth century,  like  Swift  in  the  eighteenth,  has 
set  before  us  a  nightmare  of  misanthropy. 

We  find  the  same  monotony  of  needless  misery 
in  'Jocaste.'  A  pretty  girl  likes  a  young  man 
and  marries  an  old  one;  the  husband  is  poisoned 
by  his  servant,  who  also  kills  another  man,  for 
which  he  is  executed;  the  wife  hangs  herself; 
and  the  young  man  who  loved  her  and  whom 
she  loved  develops  a  fatal  disease.  There  is 
cold-blooded  cruelty  in  this  morose  fantasy;  it 
is  painful  and  profitless,  a  mere  wantoning  in  in- 
effectual wo,  with  no  suggested  steeling  of  the 
soul  for  the  combat  of  life.  It  is  a  disheartening 
tale,  without  any  excuse  for  its  existence  since 
it  lacks  the  saving  grace  of  pity.  It  affects  to  be 
tragic;  but  it  lacks  the  inexorable  inevitability 
of  real  tragedy.  The  characters  are  killed  off  by 

213 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

the  author  himself;  and  we  feel  that  they  them- 
selves had  no  responsibility  for  their  fatal  acts. 
The  final  verdict  on  'Jocaste,'  and  perhaps  on  two 
or  three  of  M.  France's  other  stories,  must  be 
that  they  were  not  worth  while.  His  choice 
of  theme  is  not  always  felicitous,  even  if  the  ex- 
ecution is  ever  faultless. 

For  his  workmanship  is  impeccable  even  when 
his  subject  is  abhorrent;  and  the  result  is  beyond 
all  praise  when  he  happens  upon  a  topic  fit  for 
his  special  treatment  and  wherein  his  special 
qualities  can  display  themselves, — in  the  '  Proc- 
urator of  Judea,'  for  example,  in  which  he 
evokes  the  past  as  with  a  magic  glass.  In  his 
score  of  volumes  there  are  perhaps  a  dozen  other 
short-stories,  inferior  only  to  this  imaginative 
resuscitation  of  Roman  life  and  character,  as  in- 
stinct with  vitality,  as  authentic  in  atmosphere, 
and  as  alluring,  opalescent  all  of  them  with  the 
keen  interplay  of  wit,  humor  and  scholarship 
sustained  at  once  by  intelligence  and  imagina- 
tion. All  of  them  disclose  his  gift  of  sympa- 
thetic comprehension,  his  searching  insight,  his 
faculty  of  pity.  And  all  of  them  again,  if  we 
look  into  them  closely,  are  seen  to  be  the  work 
of  a  critic,  quite  as  obviously  as  they  are  the 
work  of  a  creative  artist.  In  all  of  them  we  can 
catch  the  echo  of  negation. 

These  masterpieces  of  the  short-story  are  mar- 
214 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

vels  of  artistic  execution,  as  careful  in  structure 
as  in  style.  Thus  they  stand  in  absolute  an- 
tithesis to  the  four  volumes  in  which  we  read 
about  the  sayings  and  doings  of  M.  Bergeret, 
since  the  primary  intent  of  this  'Contemporary 
History'  is  to  avoid  structure,  to  escape  from 
unity  and  regularity,  to  make  a  story  without 
beginning  and  without  end.  It  commences  any- 
where and  it  concludes  anywhere.  Formless- 
ness is  of  the  essence  of  the  contract.  It  was 
the  Latin  in  M.  France  who  planned  the  short- 
story  in  which  Pontius  Pilate  is  resuscitated,  and 
it  was  the  Celt  who  compiled  the  rambling  and 
incoherent  chronicle  of  M.  Bergeret  and  of  his 
fellow-citizens  of  the  French  republic  in  the 
tenth  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Per- 
haps in  the  first  decade  of  the  twenty-first  cen- 
tury this  may  be  esteemed  M.  France's  most 
important  work;  certainly  it  is  the  most  indi- 
vidual and  the  most  original.  After  the  novel 
had  been  bourgeoning  abundantly  in  every 
modern  language,  M.  France  was  ingenious 
enough  to  find  a  new  form  for  it;  and  his  very 
original  device  was  to  do  away  with  form  alto- 
gether, to  compose  a  story  wilfully  devoid  of 
structure.  It  was  a  novelty  in  fiction,  a  new 
idea  in  story-telling,  carried  out  unflinchingly, 
with  superb  skill  and  with  exact  understanding 
of  all  its  possibilities.  In  no  other  of  his  writings 
215 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

does  he  more  amply  display  his  extraordinary 
endowment  and  his  extraordinary  equipment. 
Every  sporadic  chapter  is  set  before  us  with  an 
incessant  glitter  of  glancing  wit,  of  biting  humor, 
of  cutting  satire  and  of  piercing  paradox. 

Mr.  Austin  Dobson  once  praised  Miss  Austen 
for  apparently  not  inventing  the  episodes  of 
'  Pride  and  Prejudice,'  but  merely  selecting  them ; 
and  in  this  'Contemporary  History'  M.  France 
has  deserved  the  same  praise  and  in  an  even 
higher  degree,  since  he  seems  not  even  to  have 
selected  his  episodes,  but  only  to  have  taken 
those  nearest  to  his  hand.  He  has  actually  given 
us  the  "slices  of  life"  that  Zola  and  Daudet 
sought  to  set  before  the  reader;  but  they  en- 
deavored to  combine  these  realistic  transcripts 
into  an  artistic  whole,  whereas  M.  France  merely 
juxtaposes  them  one  after  another,  all  of  them 
vibrating  with  the  same  intense  actuality.  He 
contributed  these  dissolving  views  of  French 
society  to  a  daily  newspaper,  mirroring  the 
shifting  events  at  the  very  moment  when  they 
had  the  utmost  of  "  contemporaneous  human  in- 
terest." He  was  not  only  up-to-date,  he  was  up- 
to-the-last-minute.  He  carried  over  into  fiction 
the  strident  note  of  the  latest  edition  of  the  even- 
ing paper. 

But  however  journalistic  the  narrative  may  be, 
it  has  the  full  flavor  of  literature  always.     Up- 
216 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

to-date  as  it  was  then,  it  is  not  out-of-date  now. 
It  is  a  permanent  photograph  of  the  daily  kalei- 
doscope of  France  in  the  dismal  years  of  the 
Dreyfus  disgrace.  It  will  survive  as  an  invalu- 
able document,  elucidating  the  temper  of  that 
time  for  all  time.  Evanescent  as  its  topics  may 
be,  there  is  nothing  ephemeral  in  their  treat- 
ment. Indeed,  the  topics  themselves  serve 
chiefly  for  discussion  from  the  divergent  points 
of  view  of  the  several  characters,  all  representa- 
tive and  significant,  all  vital  and  pertinent,  all 
seized  in  the  act  and  fixt  once  for  all.  It  is  in 
this  unending  discussion  of  events,  of  opinions, 
and  of  prejudices  that  M.  France  is  most  brilliantly 
himself  and  most  acutely  critical.  If  that  fiction 
must  be  dismist  as  inferior  which  deals  rather 
with  external  happenings  than  with  internal 
humanity,  and  if  that  form  of  the  novel  is  su- 
perior which  rejects  the  attraction  of  artful  plot 
to  focus  interest  solely  on  character,  then  has 
M.  France  attained  to  a  summit  not  trodden  by 
any  predecessor,  since  his  plotless  volumes  are 
densely  populated  with  recognizable  human  be- 
ings. 

In  this  helter-skelter  story, — if  story  that  can 
be  called  which  has  none, — in  this  undramatic 
drama  with  its  hundred  acts,  M.  France  has 
caught  the  multiplex  and  heterogeneous  aspect 
of  life  itself.  He  has  achieved  an  artistic  triumph 
217 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

by  renouncing  the  unity  of  design  which  is  a 
fundamental  requirement  of  art.  Inconsequence 
is  here  made  an  essential  element  of  the  most 
delicate  art.  Anything  may  happen  at  any  time, 
or  nothing  may  happen,  as  chance  decides. 
Perhaps  this  is  a  feat  which  only  his  surpassing 
cleverness  could  accomplish.  He  has  blazed  a 
new  trail  in  the  thick  forest  of  fiction ;  and  it 
will  be  interesting  to  see  what  will  happen 
when  any  man  less  gifted  shall  risk  a  stroll  in 
the  devious  path  M.  France  was  the  first  to  tread. 
This  follower  will  need  to  be  a  painter  of  unex- 
pected adroitness  and  of  indefatigable  insight  if 
he  shall  hope  to  rival  the  gallery  of  superb  por- 
traits thru  which  we  wander  in  these  four  loose- 
leaf  volumes. 

In  one  respect,  and  in  one  respect  only,  will 
it  be  easy  for  the  future  pupil  to  excel  his 
master, — by  avoiding  that  occasional  insistence 
upon  the  animal  side  of  life  wherein  M.  France 
vies  with  Maupassant  and  errs  more  gratuitously. 
Maupassant  had  no  prejudice  against  any  theme, 
fair  or  foul,  but  he  treated  each  in  accord  with 
its  nature,  with  the  result  that  there  is  never  a 
hint  of  indelicacy  in  any  story  of  his  the  theme  of 
which  is  not  itself  indecorous.  M.  France  seems 
never  to  have  heard  the  proverb  which  declares 
that  dirt  is  matter  in  the  wrong  place. 

TO  say  this  is  not  to  suggest  here  that  M. 
21$ 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

France  is  immoral;  it  is  only  to  assert  that  he  is 
sometimes  indecent.  Morality  may  be  a  matter 
of  opinion,  varying  with  the  peoples  and  with 
the  centuries;  and  a  philosophic  critic  like  M. 
France  may  be  justified  in  casting  doubts  upon 
all  our  principles,  as  well  as  upon  all  our  preju- 
dices. His  books  are  morally  relaxing;  they 
are  not  spoon-meat  for  babes.  Rather  are  they 
for  mature  men  who  can  weigh  the  external 
questions  of  incidental  ethics,  each  of  us  for  him- 
self. But  mature  men  are  likely  to  have  the 
healthy  palate  which  does  not  demand  the  provo- 
cation of  a  highly  spiced  sauce.  Mr.  Henry  James 
once  suggested  that,  morally,  George  Sand  had 
no  taste;  and  there  are  episodes  in  more  than  one 
of  M.  France's  works  amusing  in  themselves  but 
grating  on  our  teeth,  and  leaving  us  a  little 
ashamed  of  the  laughter  they  aroused.  And 
here  we  see  the  Celt  again  getting  the  upper 
hand  of  the  Norman,  and  even  of  the  Latin; 
the  Celt  is  wilful,  where  the  Norman  is  logical 
and  the  Latin  reserved. 

Indecorum  is  one  thing  and  immorality  is  an- 
other; and  the  question  whether  or  not  a  work 
of  art  is  moral  must  often  depend  on  our  point 
of  view.  Some  arts — architecture,  for  example, 
and  music — stand  completely  outside  ethics; 
the  other  arts  deal  with  men  and  women, — the 
drama  and  the  novel  in  prose  or  in  verse, — and 
219 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

in  these  the  artist  cannot  evade  his  moral  re- 
sponsibility. Conduct  is  three-fourths  of  life, 
whatever  we  may  say;  and  the  dramatist  and 
the  novelist  cannot  eschew  ethics.  They  need 
not — indeed,  they  should  not — put  any  moral 
into  their  work;  but  wo  betide  them  if  they 
leave  it  out.  It  is  and  it  must  be  "part  of  the 
essential  richness  of  inspiration,"  as  Mr.  James 
once  declared.  Life  is  a  saturation  of  literature, 
and  the  artist  cannot  slip  out  of  his  obligation  to 
tell  the  truth  as  he  sees  it,  even  if  the  ultimate 
morality  depends  upon  the  reader.  "There  is 
no  quite  good  book  without  morality,"  said 
Stevenson;  "but  the  world  is  wide,  and  so  are 
morals";  what  is  one  man's  meat  is  another 
man's  poison;  and  M.  France's  writings  may  not 
be  for  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men ;  a  few  of 
them  are  only  for  those  who  are  eupeptic  and 
even  stout  of  stomach. 

His  earlier  books  provoked  us  to  healthy  think- 
ing over  the  discrepancy  between  our  vaunted 
ideals  and  the  ugly  compromises  we  are  prone  to 
accept  without  repugnance.  Some  of  his  later 
books  tend  to  benumb  our  will  by  showing  that 
the  gap  between  theory  and  practice  yawns  too 
wide  and  too  deep  ever  to  be  bridged.  In  these 
later  books  he  sets  before  us  a  world  of  corrupt 
refinement  peopled  by  beings  intelligent  enough 
to  be  interested  in  moral  ideas  without  ever  allow- 

220 


A  NOTE  ON  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

ing  these  ideas  to  control  their  own  conduct.  He 
seems  to  suggest  that  any  rule  of  life  is  illusive,  a 
shifting  and  fading  shadow ;  for  humanity  at  large 
he  has  an  infinite  pity,  with  never  a  suggestion  of 
hope.  And  here  the  acid  of  his  criticism  is  too 
powerful  a  dissolvent;  it  is  an  aqua  regia  which 
even  the  purest  gold  cannot  resist.  After  all,  there 
are  some  paradoxes  which  are  not  true.  As  we 
turn  the  pages  of  the  'Island  of  Penguins,'  for 
example,  we  feel  as  tho  the  fabled  law  had  ac- 
tually been  promulgated  which  declared  that 
"everything  is  abolished"  and  that  "no  one  is 
charged  with  the  execution  of  this  decree." 
Perhaps  for  this  reason  M.  France  may  seem  to 
some  the  most  representative  of  French  authors 
in  this  opening  decade  of'the  twentieth  century, 
as  he  is  the  most  charming.  He  is  always 
abundant  in  modern  instances  which  sharpen 
the  teeth  of  old  saws;  and  he  is  affluent  in  ideas 
of  his  own,  at  once  subtle  and  searching.  The 
child  of  Renan  and  the  grandchild  of  Voltaire, 
he  will  have  progeny  of  his  own  in  the  years  to 
come;  and  the  critics  of  the  next  generation  will 
have  an  attractive  task  when  they  undertake  to 
trace  his  influence  upon  the  French  literature  ol 
the  future. 
(1910.) 


221 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 


[This  address  was  delivered  at  Columbia  University  on  Janu- 
uary  19,  1009,  at  the  celebration  of  the  centenary  of  Poe's 
birth.] 


X 

POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

THERE  is  an  obvious  propriety  in  extending 
to  a  centenary  celebration  the  benefit  of  the 
adage  which  declares  that  we  must  not  speak  ill 
of  the  dead.  Yet  we  cannot  overlook  the  fact 
that  any  praise  we  may  now  bestow  will  crumble 
swiftly  unless  it  is  solidly  supported.  Every  at- 
tempt at  beatification  must  be  futile  unless  the 
Devil's  Advocate  has  been  allowed  full  liberty  of 
speech.  In  the  case  of  Poe  the  voice  of  adverse 
criticism  has  never  been  silenced;  and  if  we  see 
fit  to  laud  him  today,  it  is  only  after  we  have 
been  forced  to  listen  to  the  shrill  protests  of  his 
assailants.  Amid  the  chorus  of  eulogy  which 
has  been  arising  around  him  of  late,  here  and 
elsewhere,  our  ears  recall  the  echo  of  many  a 
harsh  and  bitter  judgment.  Half  a  century  ago 
the  honored  chief  of  the  New  England  group  of 
authors  contemptuously  dismist  Poe  as  "the 
jingle-man."  A  quarter  of  a  century  ago  one  of 
the  subtlest  of  American  critics,  Mr.  Henry  James, 
225 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

casually  referred  to  Poe's  "very  valueless  verses"; 
and  only  this  month  a  master  of  acute  literary 
analysis,  Mr.  W.  C.  Brownell,  has  called  Poe  a 
conjurer  in  literature,  only  a  charlatan. 

Over  against  the  adverse  opinions  of  these 
American  writers  we  may  set  the  estimate  of 
not  a  few  foreigners.  Tennyson,  for  one,  held 
Poe  highest  among  American  poets,  waving 
aside  certain  others,  more  popular  with  us,  as 
mere  pigmies  compared  with  him,  and  declaring 
him  "not  unworthy  to  stand  beside  Catullus, 
the  most  melodious  of  the  Latins,  and  Heine, 
the  most  tuneful  of  the  Germans."  And  the 
general  opinion  of  the  French  is  not  lower  than 
that  of  the  British  poet-laureate,  if  we  may  judge 
by  the  fact  that  in  a  recent  list  of  the  hundred 
foremost  figures  in  literature,  Poe  is  the  only 
American.  There  is  wisdom  in  the  assertion 
made  three  centuries  ago  by  an  earlier  poet- 
laureate,  Ben  Jonson,  when  he  said  that  "Men, 
and  almost  all  sortes  of  creatures,  have  their  repu- 
tation by  distance;  Rivers,  the  further  they  runne 
and  the  more  from  their  spring,  the  broader 
they  are,  and  greater." 

Notwithstanding  the  natural  desire  of  a  young 
nation  to  make  the  most  of  all  its  native  authors, 
Poe  has  his  reputation  by  distance.  And  this 
raises  a  series  of  interesting  questions.  Why  is 
it  that  Poe's  position  as  a  poet  and  as  a  writer  of 
226 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

fiction  is  still  in  dispute  in  his  own  country  ? 
Why  is  it  that  American  critics  have  been  far 
less  cordial  than  foreign  critics?  Why  is  it  that 
Poe's  cosmopolitan  fame  is  more  wide-spread 
and  more  solidly  establisht  than  his  repute  here 
in  the  land  of  his  birth  ?  Why  is  it  that  we 
Americans  seem  to  hold  Poe  inferior  to  Long- 
fellow as  a  poet,  and  to  Hawthorne  as  a  teller 
of  tales,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  has  won 
acceptance  among  the  French  and  the  Italians 
and  the  Spaniards,  who  have  never  cared  to 
become  acquainted  with  Longfellow  and  with 
Hawthorne  ?  These  are  questions  easier  to  put 
than  to  answer;  and  yet  if  satisfactory  responses 
can  be  found,  they  will  help  to  explain  Poe's 
true  position  in  American  literature. 

If  the  significance  of  an  author  is  to  be  meas- 
ured by  the  extent  of  the  attention  he  has  aroused 
in  other  writers,  there  is  no  denying  the  high 
importance  of  Poe,  since  no  American  man  of 
letters  has  been  the  subject  of  so  many  biogra- 
phies and  the  object  of  so  many  critical  essays, 
both  at  home  and  abroad.  This  is  not  a  final 
test  of  his  value,  of  course,  since  much  of  this 
unusual  interest  is  due  to  his  ill-starred  career 
and  to  his  enigmatic  character.  He  is  the  only 
representative  here  in  America  of  the  type  to 
which  Villon  and  Musset  belong, — the  poets  of 
curious  quality  who  make  shipwreck  of  their 
227 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

lives  from  weakness  of  will, — who  hear  oppor- 
tunity knock  at  the  portal  and  who  hold  the 
door  ajar  for  a  moment,  only  to  shut  it  at  last  in 
the  face  of  the  gift-bearing  visitor.  Poe's  per- 
sonality was  not  engaging,  and  he  was  a  friend- 
less man,  altho  in  his  need  many  men  befriended 
him.  Unfortunate  disaster  followed  fast  and 
followed  faster  this  child  of  grief,  the  heir  of 
many  a  weakness,  born  out  of  time  and  out  of 
place.  His  life  began  in  somber  gloom,  and 
it  flickered  out  in  ultimate  tragedy.  To  his 
contemporaries  of  threescore  years  ago,  in  the 
thick  of  the  struggles,  political  and  economic, 
which  were  to  culminate  in  the  Civil  War,  Poe 
must  have  seemed  almost  a  disembodied  spirit, 
living  apart  in  lonely  pride.  An  exotic  with  no 
roots  in  the  soil  of  his  nativity,  he  belonged  to 
another  clime  than  ours  in  those  distant  days 
when  the  delicacies  of  pure  art  could  hope  for 
little  recognition  here.  He  had  to  breathe  an 
alien  atmosphere;  and  in  all  our  literary  annals, 
otherwise  so  pleasant,  his  is  the  saddest  figure, 
as  it  is  the  strangest. 

His  fate  demanded  pity,  but  it  could  not  compel 
liking;  and  this  lack  of  the  warmer  regard  that 
went  out  freely  to  other  of  our  writers  may  have 
been  due  in  part  to  the  disquieting  reports  of  his 
occasional  lapses  from  the  social  standards  which 
a  provincial  community  feels  called  upon  to  sup- 
228 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

port  strictly.  One  thing,  at  least,  is  admitted 
by  his  sharpest  censors, — that  whatever  Poe's 
failings  as  a  man,  he  was  not  lazy  or  shirking  as 
an  artist;  he  toiled  unceasingly,  and  he  did  his 
work  in  manful  fashion,  never  relaxing  into 
sloth.  With  the  energy  of  our  race,  he  had  also 
its  abundant  productivity;  and  in  the  scant 
seventeen  years  of  his  literary  labors  he  brought 
forth  the  ample  prose  and  verse  today  collected 
in  ten  solid  tomes.  This  we  can  count  to  his 
credit  now,  even  if  his  immediate  associates 
were  excusable  for  not  perceiving  it  before  his 
scattered  writings  had  been  set  in  order. 

As  we  turn  the  pages  of  these  volumes  we 
can  spy  out  another  reason  why  he  failed  to  win 
the  cordial  liking  of  his  contemporaries.  He 
was  no  hypocrite;  and  if  he  fell  from  grace  now 
and  again,  he  did  not  extenuate  this  by  lip- 
service  to  the  social  laws  he  had  broken.  He 
never  preacht;  and  there  is  no  moral  purpose,  ex- 
plicit or  implicit,  to  be  discovered  in  his  poetry  or 
in  his  fiction.  Indeed,  he  did  not  hide  a  haughty 
and  scornful  disdain  for  the  overt  didacticism 
which  then  dominated  American  letters.  He 
eschewed  ethics  and  strove  to  remain  outside  all 
morals.  He  was  never  immoral,  for  he  was  no 
more  sensual  than  he  was  sensuous.  Questions 
of  conduct  did  not  tempt  him  to  deal  with  them ; 
and  he  stood  aloof  when  they  were  discust.  He 
229 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

was  as  solitary  in  literature  as  he  was  in  life. 
The  men  of  his  own  time  in  his  own  country 
had  troubles  of  their  own  and  struggles  of  their 
own ;  but  Poe  took  his  place  afar  off,  as  tho  he 
had  no  interest  in  these  issues.  In  his  lilting 
lyrics  there  is  no  call  to  arms;  and  his  prose 
does  not  nerve  a  man  for  the  battle  of  life.  Poe 
is  not  a  large  genius;  and  his  appeal,  intense  as 
it  may  be  to  those  who  respond  to  it,  is  indis- 
putably narrow.  His  lyre  was  all  his  own,  but 
it  had  only  a  few  chords. 

His  endowment  is  as  rare  as  it  is  restricted. 
This  may  be  one  reason  why  he  has  been  so  con- 
temptuously brusht  aside  by  not  a  few  American 
critics,  otherwise  broad-minded.  His  genius, 
unquestionable  as  it  may  be,  does  not  touch 
mankind  at  many  points.  What  he  has  to  say 
to  us,  he  can  utter  with  direct  mastery;  but  he 
has  very  little  to  communicate.  Not  only  is  he 
without  the  deeper  conceptions  of  truth  and  of 
duty  which  have  sustained  and  inspired  the 
greater  poets  in  their  greatest  works,  but  he  has 
absolutely  nothing  to  offer  to  all  those  who  look 
to  literature  for  a  rich  expression  of  the  realities 
of  life.  His  spirit  dwelt  apart,  as  tho  it  inhabited 
an  ivory  tower  hung  with  purple  curtains  and 
topt  with  banners,  yellow,  glorious,  golden. 
His  soul  was  remote;  it  was  alien  to  this  work- 
aday world,  peopled  with  hurrying  citizens, 
230 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

athirst  for  the  actual.  He  had  no  message  for 
mankind,  but  only  this  melody  for  youthful  mel- 
ancholy. His  poems  and  his  brief  tales  lack  not 
only  moral  purpose,  but  also  spiritual  meaning. 
He  was  the  least  myriad-minded  of  literary 
artists.  He  had  no  sweep  of  intellectual  outlook, 
no  interest  in  the  world  of  ideas,  as  he  had  no 
interest  in  the  world  of  affairs.  He  had  no  relish 
for  the  every-day  aspects  of  life,  the  very  stuff 
out  of  which  vital  literature  is  made.  He  turned 
away  from  the  sturdy  creators  of  character,  caring 
little  for  Shakspere  and  less  for  Moliere;  indeed, 
he  even  boasted  that  he  would  give  fifty  Molieres 
for  one  La  Motte  Fouque. 

Mr.  Andrew  Lang  suggested  one  reason  why 
Poe  failed  to  be  taken  to  the  hearts  of  the 
American  people,  when  he  declared  that  Poe 
lackt  as  a  man  what  his  poetry  also  lackt — hu- 
manity. His  poetry  is  not  a  criticism  of  life;  in- 
deed, it  is  often  a  criticism  of  death,  as  the  same 
critic  has  suggested.  Death  and  disease  of  the 
body  and  of  the  mind:  these  were  the  themes 
he  chose.  He  did  not  find  his  material  in  man- 
kind in  its  normal  moods;  rather  did  he  seek 
out  the  abnormal,  the  morbid,  the  singular,  the 
unprecedented.  He  is  not  fairly  to  be  termed  in- 
human, but  he  was  not  quite  human  in  the  limi- 
tation of  his  sympathies.  It  was  not  the  ordinary 
he  enjoyed,  but  the  extraordinary.  He  did  not 
231 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

tell  men  about  themselves ;  he  brought  from  afar 
reports  of  startling  happenings,  and  of  marvel- 
ous mysteries  in  haunted  mansions  long  ago. 
Moreover,  even  if  he  had  a  sense  of  the  grotesque, 
he  was  devoid  of  humor,  that  searching  inter- 
preter of  humanity;  he  had  no  mirth,  no  laugh- 
ter, to  mingle  with  his  tears. 

These  are  Poe's  limitations,  frankly  stated; 
and  they  are  sufficient  to  account  fully  for  his 
failure  to  impress  widely  and  deeply  the  Ameri- 
can public,  which  is  healthy-minded  and  enam- 
ored of  the  realities  of  life.  Yet  Poe  is  what  he 
is  in  spite  of  these  limitations— and  perhaps  in 
part  because  of  them,  since  they  compelled  him  to 
concentrate  his  energy  on  what  was  within  his 
reach.  No  author  is  without  his  limitations, 
even  if  Poe's  are  stricter  than  those  of  any  other 
writer  of  equal  rank.  Within  his  contracted 
range  he  reigns  by  divine  right,  a  monarch 
whose  rule  there  is  none  to  dispute.  His  do- 
main may  be  only  an  island;  but  it  is  all  his 
own,  and  what  he  has  therein  accomplisht  is 
unique.  If  art  means  a  mastery  of  form  and 
proportion,  of  harmony  and  color,  of  design  and 
execution,  then  Poe  is  assuredly  a  true  artist 
with  few  rivals  in  dexterity  of  achievement.  If 
an  artist  is  one  who  knows  what  he  wants  to  do, 
and  who  knows  also  how  to  do  it  with  unfailing 
certainty,  then  Poe's  position  is  undeniable.  He 
232 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

stands  forward  as  one  of  the  most  skilful  artists 
of  his  language  and  of  his  century. 

Moreover,  his  art  was  not  accidental  or  intui- 
tive, as  Hawthorne's  seems  to  have  been ;  it  was 
deliberate  and  conscious.  He  had  a  body  of 
literary  doctrine,  due  largely,  of  course,  to  his 
own  idiosyncrasies;  and  these  principles  he  ap- 
plied continuously.  He  held  that  poetry  was  its 
own  excuse  for  being,  and  that  it  was  the  rhyth- 
mical creation  of  beauty.  He  lookt  on  literature 
as  an  art  only,  as  an  art  and  little  more,  demand- 
ing a  form  as  perfect  as  possible  even  if  its  con- 
tent lackt  universality.  He  had  ideas  about  liter- 
ary art,  even  if  he  had  few  about  anything  else; 
and  he  delighted  in  his  skilful  application  of  these 
ideas.  Art  for  Art's  sake  is  a  principle  that  is 
likely  at  times  to  relax  into  Artifice  for  the  sake 
of  Artifice;  and  this  is  a  defect  from  which  Poe 
is  not  wholly  free.  But  when  he  is  at  his  best 
he  hides  his  tools;  and  he  works  his  magic  by 
intricate  spells  of  which  he  alone  has  the  secret. 

Even  those  who  are  deaf  to  the  witchery  of 
his  rimes  and  to  the  sorcery  of  his  rhythms,  who 
find  no  fascination  in  the  pallid  glances  and  in 
the  ashen  draperies  of  his  spectral  muse,  ought 
to  be  able  to  admire  the  architecture  of  his  larger 
lyrics,  the  solidity  of  the  framework,  and  the 
assured  ease  with  which  the  manifold  effects  are 
controlled  and  coordinated.  By  complicated  de- 

233 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

vices  he  is  sometimes  able  to  attain  a  final  sim- 
plicity. Lowell  said  of  one  of  Poe's  poems,  that 
"it  seems  simple,  like  a  Greek  column,  because 
of  its  perfection."  He  had  at  his  command  all 
the  resources  of  metrical  technic,  pause  and 
cadence,  assonance  and  alliteration,  refrain  and 
repetend;  and  these  he  weaved  at  will,  subtly 
varying  them  to  bring  us  strains  of  ethereal 
melody,  ravishing  our  ears. 

The  finest  of  his  lyrics  throb  with  a  single  and 
sustained  emotion  voicing  itself  in  song.  His 
poetry  may  not  be  of  the  highest  order;  it  is  not 
fairly  to  be  compared  with  that  of  Spenser  or  of 
Hugo,  still  less  with  that  of  mightier  masters 
like  Dante  and  Milton ;  it  has  none  of  their  austere 
inevitability;  but  it  is  true  poetry  of  its  kind, 
nevertheless.  Even  if  it  is  not  so  broad  in  its 
appeal,  so  deep  and  so  poignant,  it  is  to  be  classed 
with  the  poetry  of  Coleridge,  of  Heine  and  of 
Musset.  It  may  have  been  but  a  scanty  plot 
that  Poe  was  able  to  cultivate  along  the  steep 
slopes  of  twin-peaked  Parnassus,  but  he  grew  in 
this  little  garden  flowers  of  his  own,  unknown 
before  and  soon  transplanted  into  many  a  distant 
soil, — fleurs  du  mal,  some  of  them,  no  doubt, 
sensitive-plants  and  marvelous  orchids.  All  can 
grow  these  flowers  now,  for  all  have  got  the  seed. 
The  note  of  liquid  melody  that  he  had  caught 
from  Coleridge,  and  also  in  some  measure  from 
234 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

Shelley,  he  transmitted  in  his  turn  to  others. 
Rossetti  acknowledged  his  influence,  and  Swin- 
burne has  felt  it  even  more  avowedly.  Baude- 
laire was  his  disciple,  and  Mallarme  also.  He  is 
one  link  of  a  long  chain,  and  not  the  least  signifi- 
cant. 

His  prose  tales  may  display  more  of  the  lesser 
invention  than  of  the  larger  imagination;  and  he 
may  not  be  happy  always  in  his  choice  of  theme, 
sometimes  attaining  only  to  horror  without 
achieving  terror,  and  racking  our  nerves  when 
he  had  hoped  to  grip  our  hearts.  But  even  when 
his  subject  is  not  really  worthy  of  his  effort,  he 
reveals  the  same  mastery  of  method,  the  same 
power  of  bathing  his  narrative  in  its  appropriate 
atmosphere.  He  is  able  always  to  bestow  on  a 
short-story  the  severity  of  form  and  the  harmony 
of  color,  the  unity  of  effect,  the  "totality,"  as  he 
termed  it  himself,  which  Hawthorne  and  Gautier 
conquered  only  occasionally  and  almost  acci- 
dentally. With  resourceful  ingenuity,  Poe  cen- 
ters the  attention  of  his  readers  on  a  single  over- 
powering situation;  and  thus  he  is  compelled  to 
simplify  character  and  to  present  it  in  mono- 
chrome outline,  subdued  to  the  chosen  tone  of 
this  special  tale.  What  Lowell  called  the  ' '  serene 
and  somber  beauty"  of  the  'Fall  of  the  House  of 
Usher'  must  be  ascribed  largely  to  its  logical 
construction,  its  irresistible  march  along  the 

235 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

dusky  path  the  author  has  prescribed.  It  is  due 
also  not  a  little  to  the  adroit  exclusion  of  every 
suggestion,  and  even  of  every  word,  not  in  keep- 
ing with  the  end  to  be  attained  at  last. 

There  is  in  the  best  of  his  brief  tales  a  con- 
structive skill,  a  command  of  design  and  a  gift  of 
decoration  rare  in  any  literature  and  almost  un- 
known in  English,  which  is  often  unduly  negli- 
gent of  form.  And  no  one  need  wonder  that 
Poe's  short-stories  wandered  swiftly  out  of  our 
language  into  French  and  Italian  and  Spanish, 
into  German  and  Scandinavian  and  Bohemian, 
into  strange  tongues  where  no  other  American 
author,  except  Fenimore  Cooper,  had  ever  before 
penetrated.  His  weird  psychologic  studies  have 
influenced  later  writers  as  unlike  as  Maupassant 
and  Richepin,  Fitzjames  O'Brien,  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  and  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling.  His  tales 
of  a  mystery  solved  at  last  by  observation  and  de- 
duction have  been  imitated  by  Dumas  and  Sar- 
dou,  by  Gaboriau  and  Boisgobey,  by  Wilkie 
Collins  and  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle.  Indeed,  the 
only  fictitious  character  to  win  international 
recognition  in  the  final  years  of  the  nineteenth 
century  is  the  reincarnation  of  a  figure  first  pro- 
jected by  Poe. 

Perhaps  we  may  be  better  able  now  to  answer 
the  questions  which  seemed  puzzling  a  little 
earlier.  Here  in  America,  Longfellow  was  taken 
236 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

to  our  hearts  because  he  brought  to  us  the  tra- 
dition of  the  old  world  our  forefathers  had  left 
long  ago;  because  he  was  friendly  and  consol- 
ing; because  he  was  the  poet  of  the  domestic 
affections,  as  Emerson  was  the  poet  of  national 
aspirations.  We  failed  to  perceive  that  Poe  was 
no  less  the  heir  of  the  ages  than  Longfellow,  that 
he  was  more  original  and  more  individual,  that 
he  had  a  stronger  and  stranger  note  of  his  own, 
destined  to  echo  in  distant  lands.  In  like  man- 
ner we  cherisht  Hawthorne,  because  he  has  a 
power  of  sustained  narrative,  a  gift  of  creating 
character,  a  piercing  insight  into  hidden  crannies 
of  the  human  conscience;  and  we  were  not  an- 
noyed that  his  "Puritan  preoccupation  with  the 
moral  forces  invalidates  his  purely  esthetic  ap- 
peal"— to  borrow  an  apt  phrase  from  Mr.  Brown- 
ell.  Here  again  we  have  failed  to  see  that  Poe 
had  a  keener  intellect,  and  that  he  had  a  firmer 
mastery  of  narrative. 

We  have  dumbly  recoiled  from  the  result  of 
Poe's  withdrawal  beyond  the  realm  of  morality. 
His  writings  have  not  the  richness  of  substance 
which  comes  from  an  understanding  of  ethical 
problems;  and  this  is  due  partly  to  his  tempera- 
ment and  partly  to  his  resentment  against  the 
uninspired  didacticism  prevalent  in  American 
literature  half  a  century  ago.  Poe  did  not  deal 
with  conduct,  and  he  had  therefore  only  a  very 
23? 


POE  S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

restricted  section  of  life  to  present — a  section  far 
too  restricted  for  us  Americans  who  look  to 
literature  for  an  explanation  of  the  problems  of 
existence.  What  Poe  had  to  offer  us  was  what 
we  sorely  needed  then, — and  what  we  did  not 
know  that  we  needed,— art.  He  gave  us  an  in- 
valuable example  of  technical  dexterity;  and  he 
called  attention  to  the  abiding  value  of  perfec- 
tion of  form,  adroitness  of  structure,  harmony  of 
detail,  and  certainty  of  execution. 

Poe's  appeal  to  his  own  people  was  limited  by 
his  aloofness,  by  his  inability  to  create  character, 
by  his  lack  of  humor, — in  a  word,  by  his  lack  of 
humanity.  And  the  special  qualities  of  art  by 
which  he  excelled  were  precisely  what  his  own 
people  were  then  least  prepared  to  appreciate. 
For  a  full  recognition  of  these  artistic  excellences 
the  Latins  are  always  apter  than  the  Teutons; 
and  the  Latins  were  early  in  admiration  of  Poe's 
skill.  But  there  is  this  also  to  be  said,  that  per- 
haps not  a  little  of  the  welcome  which  Poe  has 
won  among  the  French  and  the  Italians  and  the 
Spaniards  has  been  due  to  those  very  aspects  of 
his  genius  which  have  most  prevented  his  win- 
ning a  warmer  welcome  in  his  own  country. 
He  was  devoid  of  humor,  but  humor  is  rarely 
exportable;  it  is  likely  to  be  local  in  its  flavor, 
and  only  imperfectly  can  it  be  transplanted  to 
another  language,  He  lackt  humanity,  but  a 
238 


POE'S  COSMOPOLITAN  FAME 

narrative  of  the  deeds  of  dim  figures  can  be  trans- 
ferred easily  to  distant  climes,  since  these 
shadows  are  as  much  at  home  in  another  hemi- 
sphere as  in  ours.  He  chose  often  to  deal  with 
the  abnormal  and  the  morbid,  which  are  less 
relisht  by  the  direct  Americans  than  by  the 
more  sophisticated  Europeans.  He  eschewed 
overt  morality  and  projected  ethereal  emanations 
dwelling  in  an  immaterial  world;  and  this  would 
be  more  pleasing  to  the  inheritors  of  the  Greek 
preference  for  beauty  above  duty.  He  shrank 
from  the  themes  which  moved  the  m'en  of  his 
own  country  in  his  own  time;  and  foreigners 
may  have  found  him  easier  of  approach  because 
he  seemed  to  them  unrelated  to  his  native  land, 
unrepresentative  of  its  strenuous  aggressiveness. 

And  now  the  time  has  come  at  last  when  his 
own  people  can  afford  to  learn  from  foreign  na- 
tions how  to  value  Poe  aright.  His  deficiencies 
need  not  be  hidden  or  diminish!,  and  there  is  no 
profit  in  denying  them;  but  his  individual 
achievement  is  equally  indisputable.  He  per- 
formed a  most  useful  service  to  American  letters 
in  setting  a  standard  of  faithful  workmanship 
and  of  consummate  craftsmanship.  His  position 
in  the  American  branch  of  English  literature  may 
not  be  the  highest  of  all,  but  it  is  lofty  enough; 
and  it  is  beyond  question. 

(1909.) 

239 


FEM1MORE  COOPER 


[This  address  was  delivered  at  the  centenary  of  the  incorpora- 
tion of  Cooperstown,  on  August  8,  1907.] 


XI 

FENIMORE  COOPER 

IT  is  with  keen  pleasure  that  an  American  man 
of  letters  accepts  the  privilege  of  commemorat- 
ing again  the  genius  of  Fenimore  Cooper,  the 
earliest  of  our  authors  to  be  widely  read  beyond 
the  boundaries  of  our  own  language,  as  Irving, 
his  elder  contemporary,  was  the  earliest  to  win 
attention  outside  the  borders  of  our  own  land. 
It  is  well  for  us  that  the  first  American  novelist 
to  reveal  American  character  to  the  nations  of 
Europe  was  himself  stalwart  in  his  own  Ameri- 
canism, full  of  the  faith  that  sustains  us  all.  As 
Parkman  declared,  "  Cooper's  genius  drew  ali- 
ment from  the  soil  where  God  had  planted  it, 
and  rose  to  a  vigorous  growth,  rough  and  gnarled, 
but  strong  as  a  mountain  cedar."  And  as  Lowell 
finely  phrased  it,  Cooper  "lookt  about  him  to 
recognize  in  the  New  Man  of  the  New  World  an 
unhackneyed  and  unconventional  subject  for 
art";  he  "studied  from  the  life,  and  it  was  the 
homo  Americanus,  with  our  own  limestone  in 

243 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

his  bones,  and  our  own  iron  in  his  blood,  that 
sat  to  him." 

The  American  whom  Cooper  painted  in  his 
pages  is  the  American  in  the  making;  and  it  is 
the  earlier  makers  of  America  that  he  has  depicted 
with  sympathetic  sincerity, — the  soldier,  the 
sailor,  the  settler,  the  backwoodsman,  self-reliant 
types  all  of  them,  that  gave  no  false  impression 
of  us  to  the  rest  of  the  world.  In  thus  portray- 
ing the  sturdy  men  who  made  possible  the  nation 
as  we  know  it  to-day,  he  performed  a  splendid 
service  to  the  country  he  loved  devotedly.  His 
service  to  our  literature  is  equally  obvious. 
He  wrote  the  first  American  historical  novel, 
which  remains  to  this  day  one  of  the  best.  He 
was  the  first  to  venture  a  story  of  the  sea;  and 
no  one  of  the  writers  who  have  followed  in  his 
wake  has  yet  equaled  his  earlier  attempt.  He 
was  the  first  to  tell  tales  of  the  frontier,  of  the 
backwoods,  and  of  the  prairie.  He  stands  forth 
even  now  the  foremost  representative  in  fiction 
of  the  United  States  as  a  whole, — for  Hawthorne, 
a  more  delicate  artist  in  romance,  is  of  his  sec- 
tion all  compact,  and  his  genius  lackt  fit  susten- 
ance when  its  tentacles  did  not  cling  to  the  stony 
New  England  of  his  birth.  Well  might  Bryant 
declare  that  the  glory  which  Cooper  "justly 
won  was  reflected  on  his  country,  of  whose 
literary  independence  he  was  the  pioneer." 

244 


FENIMORE   COOPER 


"THERE  is  no  life  of  a  man  faithfully  recorded," 
so  Carlyle  has  declared,  "but  is  a  heroic  poem 
of  its  sort,  rimed  or  unrimed."  The  life  of 
Cooper  has  been  faithfully  recorded  by  Professor 
Lounsbury,  in  the  best  biography  yet  devoted  to 
any  American  man  of  letters.  Cooper  was  born 
in  New  Jersey  in  1789,  just  after  the  United 
States  had  adopted  the  constitution  which  has 
given  stability  to  our  government.  When  he 
was  only  a  year  old  he  was  brought  to  Coopers- 
town,  where  he  was  to  die  threescore  years  later. 
His  far-seeing  and  open-minded  father  had  settled 
more  acres  than  any  other  man  in  America;  and 
forty  thousand  souls  held  under  him,  directly  or 
indirectly,  most  of  them  along  the  shores  of  the 
Susquehanna,  the  crooked  river,  "to  which,"  as 
Cooper  tells  us,  "the  Atlantic  herself  had  ex- 
tended an  arm  in  welcome."  It  was  at  Coopers- 
town  that  the  future  novelist  past  his  childhood, 
"with  the  vast  forest  around  him,"  so  Bryant 
asserted,  "stretching  up  the  mountains  that 
overlook  the  lake,  and  far  beyond,  in  a  region 
where  the  Indian  yet  roamed,  and  the  white 
hunter,  half-Indian  in  his  dress  and  mode  of  life, 
sought  his  game, — a  region  in  which  the  bear  and 
the  wolf  were  yet  hunted,  and  the  panther,  more 
formidable  than  either,  lurkt  in  the  thickets." 
245 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

In  due  season  he  was  sent  to  school  at  Albany ; 
and  then  he  entered  Yale,  only  to  be  dismist  be- 
fore he  had  completed  his  course.  Thus  it  was 
that  he  lackt  the  chastening  influence  of  the  pre- 
scribed program  of  studies,  narrow  enough  in 
those  days  and  yet  broadening  to  all  who  knew 
how  to  profit  by  it.  His  own  college  never 
made  up  to  him  for  what  may  have  been  her 
mistake  or  his  own ;  but  a  score  of  years  later 
Columbia  honored  herself  by  granting  him  the 
degree  of  master  of  arts.  As  a  preparation  for 
the  navy,  Cooper  made  a  long  voyage  to  Europe 
before  the  mast;  and  on  his  return  he  was  ap- 
pointed a  midshipman.  He  remained  in  the  ser- 
vice only  three  years.  He  was  on  the  Vesuvius 
for  a  season;  he  was  one  of  a  party  that  went  to 
Oswego  to  build  a  brig  on  Lake  Ontario,  then 
girt  in  by  the  primeval  forest;  and  he  was,  fora 
while,  left  in  command  of  the  gunboats  on  Lake 
Champlain;  and  all  these  posts  gave  him  a 
knowledge  of  his  native  land  and  of  its  condi- 
tions which  was  to  stand  him  in  good  stead 
later  when  he  turned  novelist.  Afterward  he 
was  ordered  to  the  Wasp,  where  he  served 
under  the  heroic  Lawrence.  But  there  seemed 
then  no  immediate  likelihood  of  war;  so  Cooper 
married  and  resigned  his  commission. 

His  father  and  his  wife's  father  were  well  to 
do;  and  for  nearly  ten  years  Cooper  was  con- 
246 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

tent  to  live  the  placid  life  of  a  country  gentle- 
man, sometimes  at  Cooperstown  and  sometimes 
in  Westchester,  near  New  York.  He  reached 
the  age  of  thirty,  not  only  without  having  writ- 
ten anything,  but  even  without  any  special  in- 
terest in  literature;  and  when  at  last  he  did  take 
a  first  step  into  authorship,  it  was  in  the  most 
casual  fashion.  Throwing  down  a  contempo- 
rary British  novel  of  slight  value,  he  exprest  the 
belief  that  he  could  write  a  better  book  himself. 
Encouraged  by  his  wife,  he  completed  a  story 
of  British  manners  and  customs,  about  which  he 
knew  little  or  nothing  from  personal  observa- 
tion. But  so  complete  was  our  American  sub- 
servience to  the  British  branch  of  our  literature 
that  this  did  not  seem  strange  then,  even  to 
Cooper,  an  American  of  the  Americans.  This 
first  novel,  'Precaution,'  was  publisht  without 
his  name;  it  was  even  reprinted  in  England, 
where  it  was  reviewed  with  no  suspicion  that  it 
had  not  been  written  by  an  Englishman.  How- 
ever insignificant  in  itself,  this  book  revealed  to 
its  author  that  he  could  tell  a  story. 

It  is  a  commonplace  of  criticism  that  novelists 
flower  late.  Fielding  and  Scott,  Thackeray  and 
Hawthorne,  had  spent  at  least  half  of  the  al- 
lotted threescore  years  and  ten  before  they 
blossomed  forth  as  novelists, — as  tho  to  exem- 
plify the  Arab  proverb  that  no  man  is  called  of 

247 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

God  until  he  is  forty.  But  Fielding  and  Scott, 
Thackeray  and  Hawthorne,  had  been  writing 
abundantly,  from  their  youth  up,  plays  and 
poems,  sketches  and  short-stories,  whereas 
Cooper  had  served  no  such  apprenticeship  to 
literature.  But  when  he  had  once  tasted  ink,  he 
enjoyed  it;  and  in  the  remaining  half  of  his  life 
he  revealed  the  ample  productivity  of  a  rich  and 
abundant  genius.  Toward  the  end  of  the  next 
year— 1821 — he  publisht  the  'Spy,'  followed 
swiftly  by  the  'Pioneers'  and  by  the  'Pilot'; 
and  by  these  three  books  his  fame  was  firmly 
establish!  in  his  own  country,  in  Great  Britain, 
and  all  over  Europe,  where  he  was  hailed  as  a 
worthy  rival  of  Scott.  In  these  three  books  he 
made  good  his  triple  claim  to  remembrance  as 
a  teller  of  tales,  as  a  creator  of  character,  and  as  a 
poet. 

The  'Spy'  was  followed  in  time  by  another 
tale  of  the  American  Revolution,  '  Lionel  Lincoln,' 
wherein,  so  Bancroft  has  testified,  "he  has  de- 
scribed the  Battle  of  Bunker  Hill  better  than  it  is 
described  in  any  other  work."  It  was  accom- 
panied later  by  other  historical  novels,  some  of 
them  dealing  with  themes  in  European  history, — 
the  'Bravo,' for  one,  and  the  'Headsman,' for 
another, — good  stories  in  their  way,  but  with- 
out the  solid  support  which  a  novelist  has  when 
he  deals  with  his  own  people  and  his  own  time. 
248 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

The  'Pioneers'  was  made  more  important  by 
the  composition  of  four  other  Leatherstocking 
Tales,  completing  the  interesting  drama  in  five 
acts,  which  culminates  at  last  in  the  simple  hero's 
death,  told  with  manly  pathos.  The  '  Pilot'  had 
in  its  track  the  '  Red  Rover '  and  eight  other  tales 
of  the  sea;  and  it  was  also  succeeded  in  time  by 
a  '  History  of  the  American  Navy'  and  by  a  series 
of  'Lives  of  Naval  Officers,'  in  which  Cooper 
proved  his  loyalty  to  his  first  profession. 

Perhaps  it  is  not  strange  that  he  who  could 
describe  fighting  with  contagious  interest  should 
not  himself  shrink  from  controversy.  Cooper 
was  large-hearted,  but  he  was  also  hot-headed 
and  thin-skinned.  A  high-minded  man  beyond 
all  question,  he  was  high-tempered  also,  gen- 
erally opinionated  and  occasionally  irascible. 
In  his  travels  in  Europe  he  had  been  quick  to 
repel  ignorant  aspersion  against  his  native  land; 
and  on  his  return  home  he  had  not  hesitated  to 
point  out  the  failings  and  the  faults  of  his  fellow- 
citizens,  not  always  with  the  suavity  which  per- 
suades to  a  change  of  heart.  Bitterly  attackt  in 
the  newspapers,  he  defended  himself  with  his 
pen  and  in  the  courts  of  law.  That  he  was 
meanly  assailed  by  mean  men  is  shown  by  the 
fact  that  he  was  successful  in  the  several  libel- 
suits  he  brought  against  his  traducers.  But  the 
echoes  of  these  "old,  unhappy,  far-off  things 
249 


FENIMORE  COOPER 

and  battles  long  ago"  have  died  away  now  these 
many  years,  and  they  need  not  be  recalled. 
Cooper  was  independent  and  uncompromising; 
"his  character,"  so  Bryant  asserted,  "was  like 
the  bark  of  the  cinnamon,  a  rough  and  astrin- 
gent rind  without,  and  an  intense  sweetness 
within." 

Altho  these  needless  disputes  may  have  sad- 
dened the  later  years  of  his  life,  he  was  happy 
in  his  family  and  in  his  friends,  whom  he  bound 
to  him  with  hoops  of  steel.  These  friends,  with 
Bryant  and  Irving  at  the  head  of  them,  were 
making  ready  for  a  public  dinner  to  testify  the 
high  esteem  in  which  they  held  him,  when  they 
heard  that  his  health  had  begun  to  fail.  He  was 
then  contemplating  a  sixth  Leatherstocking 
Tale;  but  he  did  not  live  to  start  on  his  new 
story.  And  it  was  at  Cooperstown  that  he  died, 
in  the  fall  of  1851,  on  the  last  day  of  his  sixty- 
second  year. 


FAME  has  its  tides,  its  flood  and  its  ebb,  like 
the  ocean ;  and  the  author  who  is  lifted  high  by 
a  wave  of  popularity  is  certain  in  time  to  sink 
into  the  trough  of  the  sea,  perhaps  to  be  raised 
aloft  again  by  a  later  billow.  The  fame  of 
Cooper  soared  after  his  first  successes,  only  to 
250 


FENIMORE  COOPER 

fall  away  sadly  during  the  later  controversies. 
It  was  proclaimed  again  by  Bryant  and  Bancroft 
and  Parkman  in  the  stress  of  emotion  evoked  by 
his  sudden  death,  only  to  be  obscured  once  more 
in  the  twoscore  years  that  followed,  as  other 
literary  fashions  came  into  favor.  Now,  at  last, 
in  this  new  century  it  has  emerged  once  more, 
solidly  establisht  on  its  real  merits  and  not  likely 
again  to  be  called  in  question.  Time  has  made 
its  unerring  choice  from  out  his  many  books, 
selecting  those  which  are  most  representative  of 
his  genius  at  its  finest.  It  is  by  its  peaks  that 
we  measure  the  height  of  a  mountain,  and  not 
by  its  foot-hills  and  its  valleys.  Irving  had 
Cooper  in  mind  when  he  remarked  that  "in  life 
they  judge  a  writer  by  his  last  production ;  after 
death  by  what  he  has  done  best."  No  author 
can  go  down  to  posterity  with  a  baggage-wagon 
full  of  his  complete  works;  he  can  descend  that 
long  trail  laden  only  with  what  will  go  in  the 
saddle-bags. 

Cooper  is  a  born  story-teller;  and  the  kind  of 
story  he  excels  in  is  the  tale  of  adventure,  peopled 
with  vital  and  veracious  characters,  having  a  life 
of  their  own,  independent  of  the  situations  in 
which  they  may  chance  to  be  actors.  Of  this 
kind  of  story  the  'Odyssey'  is  the  earliest  ex- 
ample, as  it  is  the  greatest.  Professor  Trent  is 
only  just  when  he  insists  that  Cooper  lifted  "the 
251 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

story  of  adventure  into  the  realms  of  poetry." 
Even  tho  he  is  denied  the  gift  of  verse,  he  is 
essentially  a  poet;  but  he  is  no  Vergil,  no  Racine, 
interested  in  his  manner  as  much  as  in  his  matter, 
and  joying  in  craftsmanship  for  its  own  sake. 
It  may  be  acknowledged  at  once  that  he  is  not  a 
flawless  artist,  never  quitting  his  work  till  he 
has  made  it  as  perfect  as  he  can ;  and  his  best 
books  are  not  always  kept  up  to  their  high- 
est level.  He  had  the  largeness  of  affluent 
genius,  and  also  the  carelessness  which  often  ac- 
companies this,  such  as  we  may  observe  in 
Scott  and  even  in  Shakspere,  rich  creators  of 
character,  in  whose  works  there  is  much  that  we 
could  desire  to  be  different  and  not  a  little  that 
we  could  wish  away. 

As  his  devoted  daughter  admitted  loyally,  "he 
never  was,  in  the  sense  of  studied  preparation, 
an  artist  in  the  composition  of  a  work  of  fiction. 
He  wrote,  as  it  were,  from  the  inspiration  of  the 
moment."  But  even  in  this  improvisation  his 
native  gift  of  narrative  did  not  desert  him.  "It 
is  easy  to  find  fault  with  the  'Last  of  the  Mohi- 
cans,"' said  Parkman;  "but  it  is  far  from  easy 
to  rival  or  even  approach  its  excellence.  The 
book  has  the  genuine  game-flavor;  it  exhales 
the  odors  of  the  pine- woods  and  the  freshness  of 
the  mountain  wind."  In  this  story,  as  in  others, 
the  author  may  be  sluggish  in  starting,  over- 
252 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

leisurely  in  exposition,  not  always  plausible  in 
the  motives  assigned  for  the  entanglement  in 
which  his  creatures  are  immesht;  he  may  be  in- 
consistent now  and  then;  but  these  are  minor 
defects,  forgotten  when  the  tale  tightens  to  the 
tensity  of  drama.  Then  the  interest  is  beyond 
all  question;  and  we  cannot  choose  but  hear. 
We  read  on,  not  merely  to  learn  what  is  to 
happen  next,  but  to  know  more  about  the  char- 
acters as  they  reveal  themselves  under  the  stress 
of  danger.  We  are  not  mere  spectators  looking 
on  idly;  we  are  made  to  see  the  thing  as  it  is; 
we  feel  ourselves  almost  participants  in  the 
action;  breathless,  delighted,  convinced,  we  are 
carried  along  by  the  sheer  power  of  the  writer. 
There  are  two  reasons  why  Cooper  has  come 
into  his  own  later  than  was  his  right,  and  why 
full  recognition  of  his  genius  has  been  delayed. 
The  first  is  a  consequence  of  the  enduring  vogue 
of  realism,  which  has  failed  to  perceive  that  he 
was  one  of  its  precursors,  and  which  has  no 
relish  for  his  more  evident  romanticism.  Yet 
sharp-eyed  critics  ought  to  have  been  able  to  see 
that  Cooper's  detailed  descriptions  of  customs 
and  of  costumes,  when  these  were  truly  charac- 
teristic and  needful  to  relate  the  character  to  the 
background,  set  a  pattern  for  Balzac;  the  roman- 
ticist thus  serving  as  a  stimulus  to  the  realist. 
They  might  even  have  noted  that  Cooper  is  a 
253 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

romanticist  who  is  often  a  realist,  just  as  Balzac 
is  a  realist  who  is  often  a  romanticist.  In  all 
later  fiction  there  are  no  more  sternly  truthful 
characters  than  Natty  Bumppo  and  Long  Tom 
Coffin ;  and  tho  the  method  of  their  presentation 
is  not  so  modern,  they  can  withstand  compari- 
son with  Huckleberry  Finn  and  Silas  Lapham, 
with  Colonel  Newcome  and  old  Goriot. 

A  second  reason  for  the  tardiness  of  Cooper's 
recognition  may  be  found  in  the  fact  that  the  vi- 
cissitudes of  literary  reputation  seem  to  be  more 
or  less  dependent  on  the  historians  of  literature; 
and,  as  it  happens,  Cooper's  deficiencies  as  a 
writer  are  of  a  kind  obnoxious  to  the  ordinary 
literary  critics,  who  are  rarely  broad-minded  or 
keen-sighted  enough  to  perceive  beneath  his 
more  obvious  defects  the  larger  merits,  clear 
enough  to  the  plain  people,  who  are  insensitive  to 
the  lesser  blemishes  that  send  shivers  down  the 
spine  of  the  dilettant.  These  critics  are  not 
moved  by  his  fundamental  force,  which  the 
plain  people  feel  fully,  while  they  are  acutely 
sensitive  to  his  lapses  from  literary  conven- 
tions and  traditions.  Cooper  came  to  story- 
telling late,  with  little  experience  in  writing. 
He  was  not  at  all  bookish ;  he  was  not  a  man  of 
the  library,  but  a  man  of  the  open  air, — of  the 
ocean  and  of  the  forest.  In  a  sense,  he  was  not 
a  man  of  letters  at  all;  he  was  interested  not  so 
254 


FENIMORE  COOPER 

much  in  literature  as  in  life  itself.  And  we  must 
recall  the  pitiful  fact  also  that  there  are  always 
fastidious  criticasters  who  think  that  whatever 
wins  wide  popularity  must  be  poor  stuff, — igno- 
rant that  nearly  all  the  really  great  writers  have 
achieved  indisputable  popularity  while  they  were 
alive  to  enjoy  it. 

Cooper's  lack  of  early  training  cannot  be  gain- 
said; and  therefore  his  style  appeals  but  little  to 
those  who  cherish  a  rare  word  for  its  own  sake 
and  who  delight  in  verbal  marquetry.  Even  if 
he  is  essentially  a  poet,  he  is  no  sonneteer, 
polishing  his  lines  until  he  can  see  his  own  image 
in  them.  He  is  careless  of  the  rules  of  rhetoric, — 
sometimes  unforgivably  careless.  Even  in  gram- 
mar he  was-  no  purist,  no  precisian;  and  his 
use  of  words  is  not  always  defensible,  even  if  it 
is  an  overstatement  of  the  case  to  charge  him  with 
"linguistic  astigmatism."  But  if  there  is  clumsy 
writing  in  his  pages,  this  is  never  the  result  of 
the  failure  of  any  attempt  at  fine  writing.  Awk- 
ward he  may  be  at  times,  but  he  is  always  sin- 
cere and  direct;  he  is  always  unpretentious  and 
simple.  He  has  something  to  say,  and  he  says 
it  so  as  to  stamp  "on  the  mind  of  the  reader  the 
impression  he  desired  to  convey."  He  achieves 
the  primary  object  of  all  good  writings,  in  that 
he  makes  himself  clearly  understood,  even  if  he 
sometimes  fails  to  attain  the  secondary  purpose 

255 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

of  giving  added  pleasure  by  the  mere  expression. 
In  describing  nature  and  in  depicting  character, 
his  style  is  nervous  and  unerring;  and  it  can 
rise  on  occasion  into  genuine  eloquence.  When 
Bryant  first  read  the  '  Pioneers/  he  declared  that 
here  was  "the  poet  of  rural  life  in  this  country  " ; 
and  Parkman  praised  the  vigor  and  the  fidelity 
of  Cooper's  descriptions  of  scenery,  insisting 
that  they  who  cannot  feel  the  efficiency  of  his 
"strong  picturing  have  neither  heart  nor  mind 
for  the  grandeur  of  the  outer  world." 

After  admitting  that  Cooper  is  not  beyond  re- 
proach for  an  occasional  laxity  in  his  style,  for 
an  occasional  stiffness  in  his  dialog,  and  for  an 
occasional  prolixity  in  his  narrative,  it  may  be  as 
well  to  add  that  sometimes  he  fatigues  himself 
and  his  readers  in  the  search  for  comic  relief. 
Even  Scott  is  not  infrequently  tedious  in  his 
minor  characters  meant  to  be  laught  at;  and  as 
Cooper  lackt  Scott's  real  richness  of  humor,  he 
is  tiresome  more  often  and  at  greater  length. 
There  are  passages  of  admirable  humor  scattered 
here  and  there  in  Cooper's  pages,  seemingly  un- 
conscious, most  of  them;  and  there  are  quaint 
characters  sketcht  with  a  delightful  appreciation 
of  their  absurdities.  But  it  must  be  confest  that 
when  he  sets  out  to  be  funny  by  main  strength, 
he  is  plainly  joking  with  difficulty.  It  is  as  tho 
he  thrust  his  hand  into  the  grab-bag  of  our  va- 
256 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

negated  humanity,  willing  to  take  whatever  his 
fingers  might  find,  whether  it  was  truly  a  prize 
like  his  great  creations  or  only  a  wooden  doll 
drest  like  a  figure  of  fun. 

Perhaps  this  may  account  in  some  measure  for 
the  flatness  of  a  few  of  his  female  characters. 
He  can  draw  women  sympathetically,  altho 
some  of  his  heroines  are  a  little  colorless.  The 
wife  of  Ishmael  Bush,  the  squatter,  mother  of 
seven  stalwart  sons  and  sister  of  a  murderous 
rascal,  is  an  unforgetable  portrait,  solidly  painted 
by  a  master;  and  Dew-of-June,  the  girl-wife  of 
the  treacherous  Arrowhead,  a  primitive  type  but 
eternally  feminine,  is  depicted  with  equal  art. 
Judith  and  Hetty,  the  supposed  daughters  of  the 
bucaneer,  are  real  and  vivid  and  womanly,  both 
of  them.  It  is  to  be  remembered  also  that 
women  must  ever  play  a  minor  part  in  the  tale 
of  adventure,  since  the  bolder  experiences  in  life 
are  not  fit  for  gentle  and  clinging  heroines;  and 
more  often  than  not  Cooper  presents  them  with 
a  kind  of  chivalric  aloofness. 

These  adverse  criticisms  need  not  detain  us. 
There  is  no  denying  that  there  are  weak  spots  in 
Cooper's  works;  and  there  is  no  advantage  in 
seeking  to  disguise  this  or  to  gloss  it  over. 
Cooper  is  what  he  is, — even  if  he  is  not  what  he 
is  not.  He  is  a  teller  of  tales,  a  creator  of  char- 
acter, a  poet;  and  in  his  chosen  form  he  has  left 
257 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

more  than  one  masterpiece.  Very  few  master- 
pieces are  absolutely  free  from  defects;  but  de- 
fects, however  obvious  and  however  numerous, 
have  never  prevented  the  ultimate  appreciation 
of  a  masterpiece. 

in 

THAT  Cooper  was  able  to  leave  more  than  one 
masterpiece  behind  him  was  due  mainly,  of 
course,  to  his  own  genius,  but  it  was  the  conse- 
quence also  of  a  singular  piece  of  luck.  It  was 
his  good  fortune  to  take  up  novel-writing  at  the 
precise  moment  in  the  history  of  the  art  of  fiction 
when  one  of  his  predecessors  had  just  provided 
him  with  the  exact  model  he  needed,  and  when 
another  had  just  revealed  the  richness  of  the  ma- 
terial that  lay  ready  to  his  hand.  1820,  the  year 
in  which  his  imitation  of  a  British  novel  had 
proved  to  him  that  he  could  at  least  tell  a  story, 
even  tho  his  subject  might  be  alien  to  all  his 
interests,  was  also  the  year  in  which  Scott 
sent  forth  'Ivanhoe'  and  in  which  Irving  com- 
pleted the 'Sketch  Book,'  containing  'Rip  van 
Winkle'  and  the  'Legend  of  Sleepy  Hollow.' 
Scott  supplied  Cooper  with  the  mold  into  which 
he  could  pour  whatever  he  might  have  to  ex- 
press; and  Irving  disclosed  the  unsuspected  pos- 
sibilities of  romance  in  American  life,  which  had 
258 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

hitherto  been  deemed  too  barren  and  too  bare 
for  the  creative  artist  to  attempt.  Irving's  de- 
lightful tales  may  have  drawn  Cooper's  attention 
to  the  kind  of  matter  he  could  deal  with  most 
satisfactorily,  while  Scott's  historical  novel  cer- 
tainly indicated  the  manner  in  which  he  might 
handle  it  most  advantageously.  That  author  is 
lucky  who  finds  a  formula  ready  to  his  hand  and 
fit  for  the  work  he  wants  to  do,  as  that  author  is 
unfortunate  who  has  no  inspiring  model.  Per- 
haps we  have  here  a  reason  why  one  of  Cooper's 
forerunners,  Charles  Brockden  Brown,  a  man  of 
undeniable  endowment,  was  able  to  leave  so 
little  that  today  abides  in  our  memories.  He  had 
before  him  only  the  unsatisfactory  fictions  of 
Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  of  Godwin ;  and  it  is  an  inter- 
esting speculation  to  inquire  whether  he  might 
not  have  rivaled  Cooper  if  he  had  lived  a  score 
of  years  later  and  had  written  only  after  Scott 
had  devised  the  historical  novel. 

The  formula  of  the  historical  novel  as  Scott 
declared  it,  with  its  core  of  romanticism  and  its 
casing  of  realism,  was  pleasing  to  the  many- 
headed  and  many-minded  public;  and  it  was 
seized  upon  at  once  by  other  novelists  in  other 
countries.  It  was  the  formula  which  exactly 
fitted  the  kindred  genius  of  Cooper,  who  also 
had  the  native  gift  of  story-telling  and  the  power 
of  presenting  simple  and  primitive  character. 
259 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

Both  the  romantic  and  the  realistic  elements  of 
Scott's  framework  appealed  strongly  to  Cooper, 
who  had  the  same  rapidity  of  action,  the  same 
inventiveness  of  situation,  the  same  command 
of  pathos,  even  tho  his  human  sympathy  might 
be  less  broad  and  his  humor  far  less  abundant. 
But  Cooper  never  imitated  Scott  slavishly.  He 
found  in  Scott's  stories  a  pattern  fit  for  his  use, 
and  he  availed  himself  of  it,  modifying  it  freely. 
He  did  in  America  very  much  what  Hugo  and 
Dumas  were  to  do  in  France,  and  Manzoni  in 
Italy ;  he  borrowed  the  loom  set  up  by  the  Scotch 
novelist,  only  to  weave  on  it  a  web  of  his  own 
coloring. 

Scott  is  generally  considered  as  a  historical 
novelist;  but  Cooper's  historical  novels  are  not 
his  chief  title  to  fame.  In  fact,  the  best  of  them 
are  scarcely  to  be  classed  at  all  as  historical 
novels  in  the  narrower  sense,  since  they  do  not 
seek  to  evoke  the  manners  and  the  men  of  long 
ago.  The  'Spy'  and  the  'Pilot'  deal  with  the 
American  Revolution ;  and  this  was  hardly  more 
remote  from  Cooper  than  were  the  Napoleonic 
wars  from  Thackeray  when  he  wrote  'Vanity 
Fair,'  which  we  accept  now  rather  as  a  picture 
of  society  contemporary  with  the  author  than  as 
a  historical  novel.  True  romance  does  not  re- 
quire the  remoteness  of  the  past;  and  it  is  not 
the  real  artist,  but  the  magic-lantern  operator, 
260 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

who  has  to  have  the  room  darkened  before  he 
can  display  his  pictures  from  life.  The  Revolu- 
tionary conflict  had  come  to  a  happy  conclusion 
less  than  twoscore  years  before  Cooper  chose  to 
put  it  into  fiction,  and  he  had  many  friends  who 
were  survivors  of  the  strife.  That  war  was 
nearer  to  him  than  the  Civil  War  is  to  us  today. 
There  was  no  strain  of  the  imagination  needful 
before  he  could  put  himself  back  in  the  times 
that  tried  men's  souls. 

IV 

THE  'Pilot'  is  like  the  'Spy'  in  that  it  is  a  novel 
of  the  American  Revolution,  altho  its  scenes  are 
not  on  the  land,  but  on  the  ocean  mainly,  and 
also  in  that  the  nameless  hero  is  a  seemingly 
enigmatic  yet  fundamentally  simple  character 
like  the  darkly  glimpst  figure  of  Harvey  Birch. 
Altho  the  'Pilot'  is  the  result  of  a  desire  to  deal 
more  effectively  with  life  on  the  blue  water  than 
had  been  accomplisht  in  the  'Pirate,'  no  story 
of  Cooper's  more  clearly  reveals  his  real  inde- 
pendence of  Scott.  The  manner  may  be  more 
or  less  similar;  but  the  matter  is  wholly  unlike, 
and  so  is  the  point  of  view.  Scott  is  a  lands- 
man, a  dweller  in  court-rooms  and  libraries; 
Cooper  is  a  sailor,  a  man  of  the  ocean,  with  a 
tang  of  the  salt  air  in  him.  When  he  sailed  be- 
261 


FENIMORE  COOPER 

fore  the  mast  in  the  merchant  marine,  he 
bunkt  with  the  able  seamen  in  the  forecastle, 
and  he  knew  them  thru  and  thru  ;  and  when  he 
received  his  commission  in  the  navy,  he  gained 
an  equal  intimacy  with  the  officers  of  the  ward- 
room. When  he  set  out  to  tell  the  first  sea-tale 
ever  attempted,  he  was  writing  out  of  the  ful- 
ness of  knowledge  and  he  was  accomplishing  a 
labor  of  love. 

It  is  not  easy  for  us  now  to  perceive  that  the 
'Pilot'  was  a  most  daring  experiment  in  fiction. 
No  one  had  ever  ventured  to  lay  a  story  boldly 
on  the  sea  and  to  seek  for  interest  in  the  han- 
dling of  a  ship.  Now  and  again,  it  is  true,  an 
episode  or  two  of  a  novel  had  taken  place  on 
the  ocean;  and  storms  at  sea  had  tempted  the 
pens  of  the  poets.  But  the  novelists  and  the 
poets  were  landsmen,  all  of  them;  and  they 
could  not  choose  but  take  the  landsman's  atti- 
tude of  dread  rather  than  the  sailor's  attitude  of 
delight.  They  had  never  felt  the  joy  of  the  sea- 
man, when  the  wind  blows  high  and  the  giant 
surges  sweep  ahead,  and  there  is  no  land  within 
a  hundred  leagues.  Cooper  was  a  novelist  and 
a  poet  and  also  a  sailorman;  he  knew  ships  be- 
cause he  had  lived  in  them  and  loved  them;  he 
knew  seamen  because  he  had  lived  with  them 
and  appreciated  their  special  qualities. 

There  is  a  storm  in  the  'Odyssey ';  but  Homer 
262 


FENIMORE  COOPER 

was  a  landsman  who  lookt  at  the  sea  with  the 
eyes  of  a  landsman,  even  if  he  may  have  made 
a  few  coasting  trips  between  the  mainland  and 
the  isles  of  Greece.  There  is  a  storm  in  the 
'/Eneid '  also;  but  Vergil  achieved  only  a  studio- 
piece,  a  cento  from  the  Greek  poets.  Robinson 
Crusoe,  mariner  of  York,  was  wreckt  by  a  gale 
and  cast  away;  but  altho  Defoe  had  crost  the 
Channel  and  had  perhaps  even  braved  the  Bay 
of  Biscay,  he  dealt  with  the  storm  only  as  a  de- 
vice to  get  his  hero  alone  on  an  island.  Smol- 
lett had  been  a  surgeon's  mate  in  the  navy,  and 
had  sailed  the  Western  Ocean ;  but  his  eye  was 
open  only  for  the  strange  humors  of  seafaring 
men,  and  there  is  no  love  for  the  sea  in  any  of 
his  comic  chronicles,  no  understanding  of  its 
might  and  its  mystery.  Bernardin  de  Saint- 
Pierre  had  gone  on  long  voyages  in  distant 
waters,  and  he  was  able  to  call  up  a  tornado  to 
make  an  end  of  Paul  and  Virginia;  but  he  was 
only  an  artist  in  emotional  description;  he  did 
not  know  the  sea  and  love  it  as  a  sailor  knows 
it  and  loves  it.  Scott,  in  the  '  Pirate,'  had  proved 
again  the  landsman's  incapacity  to  get  full  value 
out  of  a  sea-theme;  and  it  was  this  story  of 
Scott's  which  moved  Cooper  to  undertake  the 
1  Pilot.' 

Here  at  last  was  the  real  thing,  a  story  of  the 
ocean,  of  vessels  manuvring,  of  sailors  as  they 
263 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

are, — the  work  of  a  sailor  who  was  also  a  teller 
of  tales,  a  creator  of  character,  a  poet.  Here  was 
the  formula  to  be  handed  down  to  those  who 
might  come  after,  to  Melville  and  to  Marryat, — 
good  story-tellers,  both  of  them,  but  lacking 
Cooper's  double  experience  as  a  sailor  before  the 
mast  in  a  merchant  vessel  and  as  an  officer  on 
the  quarter-deck  of  a  man-of-war.  The  very 
novelty  of  the  'Pilot,'  its  originality,  seemed  to 
the  author's  friends  dangerous,  and  they  discour- 
aged him.  Perhaps  this  is  the  reason  why  the 
story  is  a  little  slow  in  getting  under  way,  and 
why  the  author  sometimes  tacks  more  than  once 
before  coming  to  close  quarters.  There  are  a 
few  scenes  on  land,  far  less  interesting  than  those 
at  sea.  But  how  sympathetically  the  character 
of  Long  Tom  Coffin  is  presented!  How  vigor- 
ous and  how  humorous  is  the  pinning  of  the 
British  officer  to  the  mast  by  Long  Tom's  har- 
poon! How  superb  is  the  account  of  the  ship 
working  off-shore  in  a  gale!  It  is  no  wonder 
that  the  French  naval  historian,  Admiral  Jurien 
de  la  Graviere,  declared  that  "he  could  never 
read  it  without  his  pulse  thrilling  again  with  the 
joy  of  seamanship." 

Heartened  by  the  cordial  acceptance  of  this  first 

sea-tale,   Cooper  soon  spun  another  yarn,  the 

'Red  Rover,'  the  action  of  which  was  laid  wholly 

on  the  ocean, — after  the  opening  chapters.     In 

264 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

none  of  his  novels  does  Cooper  better  display  his 
mastery  of  narrative  and  his  power  of  sustain- 
ing interest.  Thereafter  he  could  not  long  be 
kept  away  from  salt  water;  he  wrote  sea-tale 
after  sea-tale,  until  there  were  half-a-score  of 
them,  setting  forth  the  most  varied  aspects  of 
the  unstable  element.  In  'Wing-and-Wing'  he 
skirted  the  lovely  shores  of  the  Mediterranean; 
and  in  the  'Two  Admirals'  he  set  in  array  a 
goodly  fleet  on  the  Atlantic.  Altho  these  ten 
sea-tales  are  not  all  of  equal  excellence,  they  are 
all  proofs  of  his  love  for  life  afloat,  of  his  insight 
into  the  shifting  moods  of  nature,  and  of  his  un- 
derstanding of  the  hardy  men  who  go  down  to 
the  sea  in  ships.  They  all  reveal  his  ability  to 
make  the  average  reader  perceive  and  enjoy 
technical  operations.  They  are  all  more  or  less 
toucht  with  the  poetry  of  the  sea  and  instinct 
with  the  gliding  grace  of  the  vessels  themselves. 
Cooper's  ships  live, — so  Admiral  Mahan  has  in- 
formed us;  "they  are  handled  as  ships  then  were, 
and  act  as  ships  still  would  act  under  the  circum- 
stances." And  the  historian  of  sea-power  holds 
that  the  water  is  "a  noble  field  for  the  story- 
teller, for  of  all  inanimate  objects,  a  sailing  ship 
in  her  vivid  movement  most  nearly  simulates 
life." 


265 


FENIMORE  COOPER 


"  COOPER  of  the  wood  and  wave,"  as  Steven- 
son affectionately  termed  him,  is  not  more  at 
home  on  the  ocean  than  he  is  in  the  forest.  Fine 
as  are  the  sea-tales,  they  are  surpassed  in  power 
and  in  popularity  by  the  five  stories  in  which  the 
career  of  Leatherstocking  is  traced  from  youth  to 
old  age.  In  the  character  typified  in  Leather- 
stocking,  Lowell  found  "the  protagonist  of  our 
New  World  epic,  a  figure  as  poetic  as  that  of 
Achilles,  as  ideally  representative  as  that  of  Don 
Quixote,  as  romantic  in  relation  to  our  homespun 
and  plebeian  myths  as  Arthur  in  his  to  his  mailed 
and  plumed  cycle  of  chivalry."  And  Thackeray 
declared  that  while  he  liked  Scott's  manly  and 
unassuming  heroes,  he  thought  Cooper's  were 
quite  their  equals,  and  that  "perhaps  Leather- 
stocking  is  better  than  any  one  in  Scott's  lot. 
La  Longue  Carabine  is  one  of  the  great  prizemen 
of  fiction.  He  ranks  with  your  Uncle  Toby,  Sir 
Roger  de  Coverley,  FalstafT — heroic  figures  all, 
American  or  British ;  and  the  artist  has  deserved 
well  of  his  country  who  devised  him."  Perhaps 
there  is  no  better  proof  of  Cooper's  genuine 
power  than  that  he  can  insist  on  Leatherstock- 
ing's  goodness, — a  dangerous  gift  for  a  novelist 
to  bestow  on  a  man, — and  that  he  can  show  us 
266 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

Leatherstocking  declining  the  advances  of  a 
handsome  woman, — a  dangerous  position  for  a 
novelist  to  put  a  man  in, — without  making  any 
reader  think  Leatherstocking  a  prig.  We  believe 
in  his  simple-minded  goodness;  and  he  keeps 
our  sympathy  in  his  rejection  of  Judith  as  in 
Mabel's  rejection  of  him. 

Cooper  was  shrewd  in  his  judgment  of  his 
own  works;  and  he  said  himself  that  "if  any- 
thing from  the  pen  of  the  writer  of  these  ro- 
mances is  at  all  to  outlive  himself,  it  is  unques- 
tionably the  series  of  the  Leatherstocking  Tales." 
For  the  deserved  popularity  of  this  series,  abid- 
ing now  nearly  threescore  years  since  the  author's 
death,  there  are  many  reasons  besides  the  noble 
simplicity  and  the  sturdy  veracity  of  the  central 
character.  There  are  other  figures  as  fresh  and 
as  real.  There  is  Hurry  Harry;  there  is  Ishmael 
Bush; — both  of  them  necessary  types  of  men 
bred  on  the  border.  There  are  Chingachgook 
and  Uncas  and  Hardheart,  good  men  and  true. 
There  is  all  the  glamor  of  frontier  life,  now  faded 
forever.  There  is  the  underlying  poetry  of  the 
unbroken  forest  and  of  the  sweeping  prairie,  of 
the  broad  lakes  and  of  the  rapid  streams.  There 
are  linkt  adventures  of  breathless  interest,  studded 
with  moments  of  poignant  emotion, — the  death- 
grip  of  the  wounded  Indian  over  the  falls,  in  the 
'  Last  of  the  Mohicans ' ;  the  implacable  execution 
267 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

of  the  traitor,  in  the  'Prairie';  and  many  another 
in  the  other  tales,  scarcely  less  tense  with  tra- 
gedy. There  is  the  rich  gift  of  narrative;  there 
are  vigor  and  accuracy  of  description.  There  is 
unfailing  fertility  of  invention ;  and  there  is  also 
the  larger  interpreting  imagination.  There  are 
pictures  of  resourcefulness  in  the  presence  of 
danger,  and  of  courage  in  the  face  of  death. 
There  is  unstrained  pathos.  And  behind  all 
these  things,  there  is  the  author  himself,  delight- 
ing in  his  work  and  sustaining  his  story  by  his 
manly  wisdom  and  his  elemental  force. 

There  would  be  no  need  to  say  more  about 
this  series,  if  it  had  not  been  attackt  for  one  of 
its  most  salient  characteristics, — for  its  presenta- 
tion of  the  red  men  with  whom  the  white  men 
of  the  forest  and  of  the  prairie  were  ever  at  war. 
Scorn  has  been  heaped  high  on  Cooper's  Indians; 
they  have  been  denounced  as  wooden  images, 
fit  only  to  stand  outside  cigar-stores ;  and  they 
have  been  described  as  belonging  to  "an  extinct 
tribe  that  never  existed."  The  first  of  these 
criticisms  may  be  dismist  as  foolish;  whether 
true  or  false,  Chingachgook  and  Uncas  and  Hard- 
heart  are  alive.  The  color  on  their  cheeks  is  not 
redder  than  the  blood  in  their  veins.  Just  as 
West,  when  he  first  beheld  the  Apollo  Belvedere, 
was  made  to  think  of  a  Mohawk  brave,  so  Long- 
fellow, at  a  performance  of  Corneille's  'Cid'  by 
268 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

theComedie-francaise,  was  reminded  of  Cooper's 
Indians  "by  its  rude  power,  and  a  certain  force 
and  roughness."  The  second  charge,  however, 
that  they  are  not  taken  from  life,  calls  for  con- 
sideration. Parkman,  for  example  (to  be  cited 
always  with  the  utmost  respect),  held  Cooper's 
Indians  to  be  false  to  the  fact  as  he  had  seen  it 
himself.  But  the  aborigines  have  been  studied 
more  sympathetically  in  the  sixty  years  that  have 
elapsed  since  Parkman  trampt  the  Oregon  trail; 
and  our  riper  knowledge  has  now  revealed  a 
poetry  in  the  red  man  and  a  picturesqueness 
very  like  those  with  which  Cooper  endowed  him. 
It  is  often  assumed  that  we  are  indebted  to 
Cooper  for  the  idealized  "noble  savage,"  whom 
Rousseau  evolved  from  his  inner  consciousness, 
and  who  is  as  remote  as  possible  from  the  real 
man  at  any  stage  of  his  social  evolution.  But 
this  noble  savage  is  not  to  be  discovered  any- 
where in  Cooper's  stories.  As  Mr.  Brownell  has 
recently  pointed  out,  Cooper  does  not  at  all 
idealize  the  red  man:  "in  general,  he  endows 
the  Indian  with  traits  which  would  be  approved 
even  by  the  ranchman,  the  rustler,  or  the  army 
officer."  And  his  Indians  are  the  result  of  early 
intimacy  and  of  conscientious  study.  His  daugh- 
ter has  told  us  how  he  followed  the  frequent 
Indian  delegations  from  town  to  town,  observ- 
ing them  carefully,  conversing  with  them  freely, 
269 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

and  imprest  "  with  the  vein  of  poetry  and  of  la- 
conic eloquence  marking  their  brief  speeches." 

If  there  is  any  lack  of  faithfulness  in  Cooper's 
presentation  of  the  Indian  character,  it  is  due  to 
the  fact  that  he  was  a  romancer,  and  therefore 
an  optimist,  bent  on  making  the  best  of  things. 
He  told  the  truth  as  he  saw  it,  and  nothing  but 
the  truth;  but  he  did  not  always  tell  the  whole 
truth.  The  Indian  was  rising  from  savagery 
into  barbarism,  with  all  that  this  implies;  and 
Cooper  puts  before  us  the  Indian's  courage  and 
his  fortitude,  leaving  more  or  less  in  the  shadow 
the  Indian's  ferocity  and  his  cruelty.  That  this 
was  Cooper's  intent  is  plain  from  a  passage  in 
the  preface  to  the  Leatherstocking  Tales,  wherein 
he  declares  that  "it  is  the  privilege  of  all 
writers  of  fiction,  more  particularly  when  their 
works  aspire  to  the  elevation  of  romances,  to 
present  the  beau-ideal  of  their  characters  to  the 
reader.  This  it  is  which  constitutes  poetry,  and 
to  suppose  that  the  red  man  is  to  be  represented 
only  in  the  squalid  misery  or  in  the  degraded 
state  that  certainly  more  or  less  belongs  to  his 
condition,  is,  we  apprehend,  taking  a  very  nar- 
row view  of  an  author's  privileges."  Here  again 
Cooper  was  akin  to  Scott,  who  chose  to  dwell 
only  on  the  bright  side  of  chivalry  and  to  picture 
the  merry  England  of  Richard  Lionheart  as  a 
pleasanter  period  to  live  in  than  it  could  have 
270 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

been  in  reality.  Cooper's  red  men  are  probably 
closer  to  the  actual  facts  than  Scott's  black 
knights  and  white  ladies.  And  when  all  is  said, 
Chingachgook  and  Uncas  and  Hardheart,  even 
if  not  completely  truthful,  justify  themselves; 
they  linger  long  in  the  memory;  they  stand  forth 
boldly,  for  their  author  has  breathed  into  them 
the  breath  of  life. 

VI 

PARKMAN  might  find  fault  with  the  validity  of 
Cooper's  Indians,  but  he  had  been  taken  captive 
by  their  vitality.  There  was  a  time  when  the 
historian  was  "so  identified  with  the  novelist's 
red  heroes  that  he  dreamed  of  them."  Just  as  it 
was  the  reading  of  Scott's  romances  which  stirred 
Thierry  to  write  the  history  of  the  Norman  Con- 
quest, so  it  was  the  reading  of  Cooper's  romances 
which  started  Parkman  on  his  life-long  task,  the 
history  of  the  protracted  struggle  between  France 
and  England  here  in  America.  Probably  it  was 
Cooper  also,  quite  as  much  as  Parkman,  who 
moved  another  American  historian  to  narrate  the 
successive  stages  of  the  'Winning  of  the  West'; 
and  Mr.  Roosevelt  has  been  glad  always  to  tes- 
tify to  the  stern  reality  of  Cooper's  steadfast  bor- 
derers. 

This  reveals  to  us  that  underlying  the  Leather- 
stocking  Tales,  and  bestowing  significance  upon 
271 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

them,  is  the  fact  that  they  set  forth  imaginary 
episodes  in  a  real  struggle,  in  that  long  conflict 
between  two  opposing  civilizations,  which  looms 
larger  than  any  mere  war  and  which  has  true 
epic  grandeur  in  the  clash  of  contending  racial 
ideals.  This  is  what  lends  to  the  Leatherstock- 
ing  Tales  their  largeness;  and  this  is  what  gives 
them  their  major  meaning  for  us.  They  help  to 
explain  how  it  was  that  these  United  States  came 
to  be  what  they  are. 

Cooper  has  told  us,  in  the  introduction  to  the 
'Spy,'  that  after  he  had  publisht  his  empty  imi- 
tation of  a  British  novel,  it  became  a  matter  of 
reproach  among  his  friends  that  "he,  an  Ameri- 
can in  heart  as  in  birth,"  should  have  depicted 
' '  a  state  of  society  so  different  from  that  to  which 
he  belonged."  This  reproach  it  was  which 
moved  him  to  undertake  the 'Spy,' in  which  "he 
chose  patriotism  for  his  theme."  And  patriotism 
is  the  theme  of  all  his  greater  books. 

Cooper  was  intensely  American  in  his  feeling, 
and  yet  broadly  cosmopolitan  in  his  outlook  on 
the  world.  Not  for  nothing  had  he  been  an  offi- 
cer in  the  American  navy,  and  also  a  long  so- 
journer  in  Europe.  He  had  a  noble  detachment 
from  all  that  was  petty  and  temporary.  In  his 
novels  he  is  curiously  fair  to  all  manner  of  for- 
eigners, possessing  apparently  the  subtle  sym- 
pathy which  gives  understanding.  And  here  he 
272 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

stands  in  striking  contrast  with  only  too  many 
of  his  countrymen  fourscore  years  ago,  who  were 
at  one  and  the  same  time  provincial  in  their  boast- 
fulness  and  colonial  in  their  subservient  deference 
to  the  opinion  of  the  mother-country.  Cooper 
was  stanchly  patriotic;  "with  him,"  so  Profes- 
sor Lounsbury  tells  us,  "love  of  country  was 
not  a  sentiment,  it  was  a  passion."  Perhaps  be- 
cause of  his  unbounded  faith  in  the  future  of  his 
native  land,  he  was  not  blind  to  her  present 
faults;  and  while  he  "defended  his  country  from 
detractors  abroad," — to  borrow  Bryant's  apt 
phrase, — "he  sought  to  save  her  from  flatterers 
at  home." 

The  elder  Dana  dwelt  upon  Cooper's  "self-reli- 
ance and  civic  courage,  which  would  with  equal 
freedom  speak  out  in  the  face  of  the  people, 
whether  they  were  friendly  or  adverse."  Civic 
courage  is  a  virtue  none  too  common,  even  now- 
adays; and  Cooper  possest  it  in  a  high  degree. 
It  needs  to  be  noted  also  that  Cooper's  opinions 
upon  public  matters  were  not  casual  or  freakish ; 
they  were  founded  on  principle.  He  had  given 
careful  consideration  to  the  affairs  of  state;  and 
he  had  a  political  philosophy  of  his  own,  more 
solidly  buttrest  than  we  can  discover  in  the  equip- 
ment of  any  other  writer  of  romance  of  this  cen- 
tury, whether  American  or  European.  Recall 
the  thinness  of  Dickens's  political  theories,  for 

273 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

example,  or  of  Hawthorne's.  Even  Hugo's  are 
found  on  analysis  to  be  vague  and  fantastic. 
"Cooper's  politics,"  as  Mr.  Brownell  has  re- 
minded us,  "are  rational,  discriminating  and 
suggestive.  He  knew  men  as  Lincoln  knew 
them — which  is  to  say  very  differently  from 
Dumas  and  Stevenson."  There  is  no  demand 
on  any  of  us  that  we  shall  accept  Cooper's  polit- 
ical theories,  or  reduce  them  to  a  system.  It  is 
enough  that  he  had  a  body  of  doctrine,  complete 
and  clear,  which  gives  to  his  fiction  a  certain 
solidity  lacking  in  that  of  all  the  others  who 
have  undertaken  the  tale  of  adventure. 

It  is  the  triple  duty  of  the  novelist  and  of  the 
dramatist  to  make  us  see,  to  make  us  feel,  and 
to  make  us  think.  Cooper  succeeded  in  making 
his  readers  think,  even  tho  they  might  resent  it, 
because  he  had  done  his  own  thinking  in  ad- 
vance. And  his  thinking  had  not  been  done  in 
a  vacuum;  he  was  not  only  shrewd  and  saga- 
cious, he  had  also  an  immense  variety  of  infor- 
mation, not  merely  upon  the  ocean  and  the  forest, 
but  upon  subjects  as  remote  as  horticulture  and 
agriculture  and  stock-raising.  His  friends  were 
"struck  with  the  inexhaustible  vivacity  of  his 
conversation  and  the  minuteness  of  his  know- 
ledge in  everything  which  depended  upon  acute- 
ness  of  observation  and  exactness  of  recollec- 
tion." 

274 


FENIMORE   COOPER 
VII 

WHEN  all  is  said,  Cooper  stands  forth  a  large 
man,  in  himself,  in  his  work,  and  in  the  range 
of  his  influence.  If  we  may  judge  an  author  by 
the  number  of  those  he  has  stimulated,  Cooper 
must  take  high  rank.  He  has  stirred  a  host  of 
other  writers,  often  men  who  pursued  wholly 
different  artistic  ideals.  He  drew  from  Balzac 
"roars  of  pleasure  and  admiration";  and  Dumas 
avowedly  imitated  him  in  the  '  Mohicans  of 
Paris.'  Mr.  Kipling  once  remarked  to  me,  after 
a  rereading  of  Cooper,  that  he  had  come  across 
scene  after  scene  which  he  knew  already  in  the 
narratives  of  later  novelists,  and  that  a  host  of 
later  writers  had  been  going  to  Cooper's  works, 
as  to  a  storehouse  of  effective  situations  where 
they  could  help  themselves,  so  fertile  in  inven- 
tion was  the  earlier  American  author.  Even 
Thackeray  did  not  disdain  to  borrow  from  him 
the  hint  of  one  of  his  noblest  chapters;  and  Poe 
may  have  taken  over  the  suggestion  for  the 
method  of  his  marvelously  acute  M.  Dupin  from 
the  skill  with  which  Cooper's  redskins  followed 
a  trail  blind  to  eyes  less  acute  than  theirs. 

A  poet,  a  teller  of  tales  which  moved  many 

others  to  imitation  and  from  which  many  others 

might  borrow,  he  was  above  all  else  a  creator  of 

characters,  which  could  not  be  taken  from  him. 

275 


FENIMORE   COOPER 

It  is  by  the  characters  he  brings  into  being  that 
a  novelist  survives :  and  it  is  by  this  test  that  he 
must  abide.  And  certain  of  the  wisest  critics  of 
the  nineteenth  century  have  testified  to  Cooper's 
power  of  giving  life  to  creatures  that  the  world 
will  not  willingly  let  die.  Lowell  made  sure 
that  Natty  Bumppo 

Won't  go  to  oblivion  quicker 
Than  Adams  the  parson  and  Primrose  the  vicar. 

Sainte-Beuve  declared  that  Cooper  possest  that 
"creative  faculty  which  brings  into  the  world 
new  characters,  and  by  virtue  of  which  Rabe- 
lais produced  Panurge;  Le  Sage,  Gil  Bias;  and 
Richardson,  Pamela."  There  can  be  no  higher 
praise  than  this.  Cooper  deserved  it;  and  by  so 
doing,  as  Thackeray  said,  he  deserved  well  of  his 
country. 

(190?-) 


276 


BRONSON  HOWARD 


XII 
BRONSON  HOWARD 

THE  untimely  death  of  Bronson  Howard  be- 
fore he  had  attained  to  the  allotted  three- 
score years  and  ten,  broke  a  friendship  which 
had  begun  very  shortly  after  I  had  been  present 
at  the  first  night  of  'Saratoga,'  his  earliest  suc- 
cessful play,  now  nearly  forty  years  ago.  Only 
the  few  whom  he  had  admitted  to  intimacy  could 
know  what  his  friendship  meant  to  all  who  were 
fortunate  enough  to  possess  it.  But  even  casual 
acquaintances  must  have  felt  drawn  toward  him 
by  his  cheery  simplicity  of  manner.  Perhaps 
even  those  who  saw  him  only  on  occasion,  may 
have  noted  in  him  a  certain  elemental  largeness; 
and  they  could  not  fail  to  find  him  at  once  genial 
and  direct,  kindly  and  manly.  He  was  a  delight- 
ful talker,  shrewd  and  sagacious,  and  yet  easy 
and  wholly  without  pretense.  He  did  his  own 
thinking;  but  he  never  forced  his  opinions  on 
others.  He  was  the  soul  of  courtesy;  and  witty 
as  he  was,  he  never  riskt  the  loss  of  his  friend 
for  the  sake  of  his  jest.  He  sought  always  to 
279 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

maintain  the  dignity  of  his  calling;  and  he  was 
held  in  high  regard  by  all  his  colleags  of  the 
craft.  He  was  the  founder  of  the  American 
Dramatists  Club,  following  in  the  footsteps  of 
Beaumarchais,  who  organized  the  French  Dra- 
matic Authors  Society,  and  of  Scribe,  who  reor- 
ganized it;  and  under  Bronson  Howard's  leader- 
ship this  association  succeeded  in  securing  an 
extension  of  the  legal  protection  for  stage-right 
here  in  the  United  States  broader  than  that  yet 
granted  by  any  other  nation. 

His  career  as  a  dramatist  was  long  and  honor- 
able. It  was  also  extraordinarily  successful; — 
indeed,  it  would  be  difficult  to  name  any  play- 
wright who  had  scored  so  many  hits,  most  of 
them  bull's-eyes,  with  so  few  misses.  Altho  he 
conformed  to  the  stage-conventions  of  his  own 
day,  he  was  original  and  independent.  He  made 
no  translations  or  adaptations,  with  the  single 
exception  of  'Wives,'  a  contaminatio  (as  the 
Latins  would  term  it)  of  two  of  Moliere's  come- 
dies— the  'School  for  Husbands'  and  the  'School 
for  Wives.'  He  collaborated  only  twice,  first 
with  Sir  Charles  Young  (the  author  of  'Jim  the 
Penman'),  and  second  with  a  younger  American 
man  of  letters;  and  in  neither  case  were  these 
plays  in  partnership  as  well  received  by  the  pub- 
lic as  the  most  of  those  which  he  had  written 
alone.  Yet  he  believed  heartily  in  collaboration, 
280 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

holding  that  in  the  arduous  work  of  construc- 
tion, on  which  a  drama  must  depend,  two  heads 
are  better  than  one.  And  he  was  an  ideal  col- 
laborator himself,  considerate  and  suggestive, 
bringing  to  the  joint  work  his  rich  experience 
and  his  quick  inventiveness.  And  only  the  inti- 
macy of  collaboration  could  reveal  completely 
his  abiding  sincerity  and  his  desire  for  truth, 
combined  with  his  innate  feeling  for  theatrical 
effectiveness  and  his  intuitive  understanding  of 
the  actor's  art,  which  every  playwright  must 
needs  possess,  if  he  hopes  to  see  what  he  has 
conceived  in  the  silence  of  the  study  take  on  life 
and  movement  in  the  glare  of  the  stage. 

He  graduated  from  journalism  into  play-writ- 
ing, as  Mr.  Augustus  Thomas  and  Mr.  George 
Ade  have  done  since.  He  was  the  earliest  Ameri- 
can playwright  (not  also  an  actor  or  a  manager) 
to  make  his  living  by  writing  for  the  theater. 
Before  he  began  his  career,  an  American  comedy 
was  something  casual,  accidental,  sporadic ;  it 
could  be  only  amateur  work.  He  was  the  first 
professional  dramatist,  giving  his  whole  life  to 
his  work.  He  blazed  the  trail  for  the  dozen  or 
the  score  of  authors  who  are  now  seeking  to  set 
on  the  stage  the  salient  characteristics  of  Ameri- 
can life.  He  was  the  first  American  playwright 
who  had  a  recognized  position  in  Great  Britain; 
and  we  may  regard  him  as  the  scout  of  that 
281 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

friendly  invasion  which  has  resulted  recently  in 
the  simultaneous  occupancy  of  half-a-dozen 
London  theaters  by  pieces  of  American  author- 
ship. 

His  earlier  plays  suffered  a  sea-change  in  cross- 
ing the  Atlantic,  and  were  adapted  by  British 
writers  to  conform  to  British  manners  and  cus- 
toms. '  Saratoga '  was  condensed  and  localized 
by  Frank  Marshall,  who  renamed  it  'Brighton.' 
The  '  Banker's  Daughter '  was  transformed  by 
James  Alberry,  and  called  'The  Old  Love  and 
the  New.'  The  American  author  himself  modi- 
fied '  Hurricanes '  for  London  audiences  and  gave 
it  a  new  title,  '  Truth.'  In  time,  the  London 
managers  found  that  the  London  playgoers  were 
outgrowing  the  insularity  which  had  insisted  on 
the  adapting  of  exotic  plays  to  British  condi- 
tions;  and  therefore  'Young  Mrs.  Winthrop' 
and  the  '  Henrietta '  were  presented  in  England 
as  they  had  been  performed  in  America.  Sir 
Charles  Wyndham  even  ventured  to  have  'Sara- 
toga' adapted  into  German  by  Paul  Lindau,  as 
'Seine  erste  und  einzige  Liebe';  and  he  acted  it 
in  Berlin.  Apparently  this  was  the  first  time 
any  play  of  American  authorship  had  ever  been 
performed  in  any  other  than  the  language  in 
which  it  had  been  originally  composed. 

It  was  characteristic  of  Bronson  Howard's  con- 
scientiousness that  he  was  always  most  scru- 
282 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

pulous  in  declaring  whatever  indebtedness  he 
might  have  to  any  predecessor.  He  printed  on 
the  program  of  'Moorcroft'  an  acknowledgment 
that  he  had  derived  the  suggestion  for  the  play 
from  a  short-story  by  John  Hay,  altho  what  he 
had  borrowed  was  so  insignificant  that  Hay  told 
me  he  would  never  have  suspected  his  own 
share  in  the  work  if  Bronson  Howard  had  not 
called  attention  to  it.  In  like  manner  he  set 
forth  on  the  playbill  of  the  'Henrietta'  the  fact 
that  one  episode  had  its  origin  in  a  chapter  of 
'Vanity  Fair.'  In  a  speech  before  the  curtain, 
on  the  hundredth  performance  of  the  '  Banker's 
Daughter,'  he  took  occasion  publicly  to  thank 
the  late  A.  R.  Cazauran  for  helping  him  to  get 
into  its  final  shape  one  of  the  important  acts, 
assistance  for  which  the  author  had  already 
liberally  paid. 

When  he  was  engaged  in  the  composition  of 
'  Peter  Stuyvesant,'  he  declared  to  the  friend  with 
whom  he  was  collaborating  the  principle  on 
which  he  had  always  acted.  He  said  that  while 
an  author  was  at  work  his  whole  duty  was  to 
the  play  he  was  engaged  on,  and  he  ought  to 
use  in  its  construction  unhesitatingly  whatever 
material  it  might  need.  Then,  when  the  play 
was  completed  the  artist  had  a  duty  as  an  honest 
man  to  look  over  his  work  and  to  decide 
whether  it  contained  anything  that  really  be- 
283 


BRONSON    HOWARD 

longed  to  any  one  else,  living  or  dead,  native 
or  foreign.  If  the  original  owner  was  alive,  his 
permission  must  be  had  ;  and  this  must  be  paid 
for,  if  necessary.  And  in  any  event,  complete 
acknowledgment  must  be  made,  so  that  the 
author  might  not  seem  to  be  deckt  with  bor- 
rowed plumes.  Here  he  laid  down  the  law 
for  every  dramatist  with  an  acute  conscience. 
Bronson  Howard  himself  was  incapable  of  ac- 
cepting the  custom  which  obtained  in  England 
half-a-century  ago,  and  which  allowed  the 
announcement  of  the  '  Ticket-of-Leave  Man'  as 
a  "new  play  by  Tom  Taylor,"  when  this  new 
play  was  in  fact  only  an  adaptation  of  the 
'Leonard'  of  Brisebarre  and  Nus.  There  is  ab- 
solutely no  foundation  for  the  malevolent  in- 
sinuation, recently  revived,  that  the  plot  of 
'Saratoga'  had  been  borrowed  from  some  un- 
identified French  piece.  But,  of  course,  Bronson 
Howard,  like  every  other  dramatist,  living  or 
dead,  used  unhesitatingly  the  situations  which 
are  the  common  property  of  all  who  write  for 
the  theater. 

Bronson  Howard's  career  as  a  dramatist  covered 
the  transition  period  of  the  modern  drama,  when 
it  was  changing  from  the  platform-stage  to  the 
picture-frame  stage.  His  immediate  predecessor, 
Dion  Boucicault,  workt  in  accordance  with  the 
conditions  of  the  platform-stage  with  its  rhetori- 
284 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

cal  emphasis,  its  confidential  soliloquies  to  the 
audience,  and  its  frequent  changes  of  scene  in 
the  course  of  an  act.  'London  Assurance,'  for 
example,  is  built  absolutely  upon  the  model  of 
the  'School  for  Scandal';  and  both  comedies, 
Boucicault's  as  well  as  Sheridan's,  have  to  be 
rearranged  to  adjust  them  to  the  theater  of  today, 
with  its  box-sets  and  with  its  curtain  close  to 
the  footlights.  When  Bronson  Howard  began 
to  write  for  the  stage  he  accepted  the  convenient 
traditions  of  the  time,  altho  he  followed  T.  W. 
Robertson  in  giving  only  a  single  set  to  each  act. 
As  a  result  of  this  utilization  of  conventions  soon 
to  seem  outworn,  certain  of  his  earlier  plays  ap- 
peared to  him  late  in  life  impossible  to  bring  down 
to  date,  as  they  had  been  composed  in  accord- 
ance with  a  method  now  discarded.  This  dis- 
advantage is  possibly  only  temporary  ;  and  even 
if  these  pieces  strike  us  now  as  a  little  out  of 
fashion,  in  time  they  may  come  to  take  on  the 
quaint  charm  of  the  old-fashioned. 

He  moved  with  his  time ;  and  his  latest  plays, 
'Aristocracy'  for  one  and  'Kate'  for  another,  are 
in  accord  with  the  more  modern  formula.  Yet 
he  did  not  go  as  far  as  some  other  playwrights 
of  today.  He  knew  that  the  art  of  the  theater, 
like  every  other  art,  can  live  only  by  the  con- 
ventions which  allow  it  to  depart  from  the  mere 
facts  of  life ;  and  he  was  unwilling  to  relinquish 
285 


BRONSON    HOWARD 

the  soliloquy,  for  instance,  which  is  often  not 
only  serviceable  but  actually  necessary.  He 
once  said,  half  jokingly,  to  his  collaborator  in 
'Peter  Stuyvesant/  that  if  he  had  happened  to 
write  a  play  without  a  single  soliloquy,  he  would 
be  tempted  to  insert  one,  simply  to  retain  the 
right  to  employ  it  when  it  was  required.  It  may 
be  noted,  however,  that  he  did  not  carry  this 
out,  since  his  last  comedy,  'Kate,'  is  free  from 
any  soliloquy.  He  followed  with  unfailing  sym- 
pathy and  with  unflagging  interest  the  rejuvena- 
tion of  the  drama  toward  the  end  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  He  had  no  liking  for  Ibsen's 
attitude  toward  life,  but  he  had  the  keenest 
appreciation  of  Ibsen's  masterly  technic. 

His  first  successful  piece  was '  Saratoga, '  which, 
altho  announced  by  Augustin  Daly,  the  manager 
who  produced  it,  as  a  "comedy  of  contempo- 
raneous manners,"  was  in  fact  only  a  farce, 
wholly  unrelated  to  contemporaneous  manners 
or  even  to  real  life.  Like  most  other  playwrights, 
Howard  began  unambitiously  and  unpretend- 
ingly, desirous  of  composing  the  kind  of  play 
likely  to  please  the  audiences  of  his  own  day, 
the  kind  of  play  they  were  accustomed  to  relish. 
'Saratoga'  owed  its  popularity  to  the  brisk  in- 
genuity of  its  intrigue,  to  the  unflagging  vivacity 
of  its  adroit  situations,  and  to  the  humorous 
felicity  of  its  dialog.  Its  characters  were  little 
286 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

more  than  the  traditional  figures  of  farce ;  and 
one  of  its  episodes  set  forth  the  sending  of  a 
series  of  challenges  to  a  duel — a  convenient 
theatrical  tradition  not  even  then  justified  by  the 
customs  of  society.  Inexpensive  devices  of  this 
sort  the  author  eschewed  altogether  as  he  grew 
in  experience  and  as  his  observation  became 
keener.  But  'Saratoga/  arbitrary  as  it  is  in  con- 
ception, in  its  characters,  and  in  the  conduct  of 
its  plot,  deserved  its  popularity.  Perhaps  it 
might  amuse  even  today,  if  it  were  presented, 
not  as  a  "comedy  of  contemporaneous  man- 
ners," but  as  a  specimen  of  the  farce  of  our 
fathers,  with  the  costumes  of  1870. 

As  he  gained  in  technical  skill,  Howard's  am- 
bition developed,  and  his  next  play,  '  Diamonds ' 
(which  was  also  produced  at  Daly's  Theater), 
was  really  a  "comedy  of  contemporaneous 
manners,"  altho  it  did  not  quite  answer  to  its 
author's  hopes.  Slowly  his  insight  into  social 
conditions  became  clearer;  and  yet  even  the 
'  Banker's  Daughter '  has  at  the  core  of  it  the 
heroine's  marriage  with  a  man  she  does  not  love 
— a  self-sacrifice  which  might  be  termed  almost 
immoral  and  which  the  author  never  would  have 
approved  a  few  years  later.  Perhaps  he  first  at- 
tained his  larger  ambition  in  '  Young  Mrs.  Win- 
throp,' — to  satisfy  it  more  completely  in  the 
'  Henrietta,'  which  remains  to-day  his  most 
287 


BRONSON    HOWARD 

solid  piece  of  work.  Here,  indeed,  in  contra- 
diction to  the  generally  accepted  theory  that  the 
novel  is  constantly  in  advance  of  the  drama  in 
its  investigation  into  society,  the  dramatist  pre- 
sented a  picture  of  American  life  and  character 
sharper  in  outline  than  any  which  had  then  been 
achieved  by  any  novelist,  with  the  sole  excep- 
tion of  the  author  of  '  Silas  Lapham.' 

Different  as  these  two  plays  are, — '  Young 
Mrs.  Winthrop,'  a  delicate  comedy  of  manners 
and  sentiment,  and  the  'Henrietta,'  a  bold  and 
robust  social  drama, — they  had  a  common  origin 
in  the  author's  observation  of  the  society  in 
which  he  lived.  It  was  about  at  this  point  in 
his  work  that  he  confided  to  a  friend  his  dis- 
covery that  every  country  had  one  theme  on 
which  numberless  plays  might  be  written  with 
a  firm  assurance  that  at  least  the  subject  itself 
would  be  welcome  to  the  playgoers  of  that 
nation.  "In  France,"  he  explained,  "this  per- 
ennial topic  is  marital  infelicity  ;  in  England  it  is 
caste ;  and  here  in  the  United  States  it  is  busi- 
ness." It  was  business,  in  one  or  another  of  its 
ramifications,  which  he  chose  to  put  into  the 
center  of  these  two  plays  in  which  he  has  most 
completely  exprest  himself. 

This  understanding  of  the  importance  of  busi- 
ness in  American  life,  and  this  desire  of  his  to 
show  some  of  its  perils  to  his  fellow-citizens, 
288 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

may  be  taken  as  added  evidence  of  his  keen  in- 
sight into  conditions  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic, 
and  of  his  intense  Americanism, — an  American- 
ism which  was  cosmopolitan  in  its  outlook  and 
radically  free  from  any  spread-eagleism.  He 
knew  England  well,  and  the  English  also;  and 
he  liked  them.  He  had  traveled  widely,  keep- 
ing his  mind  open  as  he  went,  so  that  he  under- 
stood other  peoples  with  a  quicker  sympathy 
than  most  Americans.  But  tho  he  might  choose 
now  and  again  to  present  international  contrasts 
of  character  and  to  set  Americans  over  against 
foreigners,  sometimes  even  on  foreign  soil,  it  is 
on  his  own  countrymen  that  he  spends  his  full 
strength.  His  plays,  all  of  them,  from  first  to  last, 
are  essentially  American  in  theme  and  in  outlook. 
It  was  in  their  content  only  that  his  comedies 
revealed  the  country  of  their  birth.  In  their 
form,  the  later  of  them  were  in  complete  accord 
with  the  cosmopolitan  standard  accepted  every- 
where at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
when  the  conditions  of  performance  were  iden- 
tical thruout  the  world.  One  of  the  most  inter- 
esting results  of  the  comparative  study  of  modern 
literature  is  the  discovery  that  exactly  the  same 
formula  may  now  be  employed  by  authors  of 
many  different  languages,  each  of  whom  is  put- 
ting the  full  flavor  of  his  native  soil  into  works 
composed  after  a  model  which  has  international 
289 


BRONSON    HOWARD 

vogue.  The  'Henrietta'  of  Bronson  Howard  is 
as  vibratingly  American  in  its  flavor  as  the  'Robe 
Rouge'  of  M.  Brieux  is  unmistakably  French  in 
color,  and  as  the  'Heimat'  of  Herr  Sudermann  is 
emphatically  German  in  tone;  but  in  their  form, 
in  their  structure,  in  their  method  of  presenting 
their  several  stories,  these  plays  are  all  closely 
alike.  And  it  was  Bronson  Howard  who,  first 
of  all  American  playwrights,  attained  to  the 
compact  simplicity  and  the  straightforward 
directness  which  this  new  cosmopolitan  formula 
demands. 

Artists  often  do  their  best,  more  or  less  un- 
conscious of  their  processes,  working  by  native 
instinct,  and  incapable  of  formulating  the  prin- 
ciples they  have  obeyed.  But  there  are  a  few 
of  them,  more  intelligent  it  may  be  and  more 
inquisitive,  who  are  able  to  deduce  from  their 
own  practice  a  body  of  doctrine  for  future  guid- 
ance. This  is  what  Bronson  Howard  did.  He 
had  workt  out  for  himself  the  principles  of  the 
little  understood  art  of  dramaturgy.  He  had  as 
clear  insight  into  the  inexorable  limitations 
which  govern  the  presentation  of  a  play  on  the 
stage  before  a  succession  of  audiences  as  Sarcey 
had,  or  the  younger  Dumas.  What  he  did  by  in- 
tuition, he  could  justify  by  precept.  He  had 
thought  his  art  thru  and  thru  in  all  its  manifold 
intricacies ;  and  as  a  result  he  had  penetrated  to 
290 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

its  comparatively  few  essential  laws.  He  went 
behind  the  rough-and-ready  rule-of-thumb  dog- 
mas of  the  practical  stage-manager  to  lay  firm 
hold  on  the  permanant  principles  which  underly 
them  all.  One  of  these  stage  sayings  is  the 
dictum  that  you  must  never  keep  a  secret  from 
the  audience  and  never  put  the  spectators  on  a 
false  scent ;  and  the  reasons  for  these  are  self- 
evident.  This  rule  is  broken  in  'Young  Mrs. 
Winthrop,'  where  the  author  keeps  concealed  the 
real  motives  of  the  husband's  repeated  visits  to 
the  woman  of  whom  the  wife  is  jealous,  and 
allows  the  spectators  to  put  themselves  on 
a  false  scent.  Here  Bronson  Howard  vio- 
lated a  stage-tradition;  he  transgrest  the 
minor  rule  to  abide  by  a  major  law,  retaining 
the  sympathy  of  the  audience  for  the  heroine 
when  she  left  her  husband's  home,  a  sympathy 
which  she  would  have  lost  if  the  spectators 
had  themselves  been  aware  that  the  husband's 
conduct  was  blameless. 

Bronson  Howard  recognized  fully  that  the 
drama  is  not  wholly  contained  within  the  bounds 
of  literature.  Like  every  other  true  dramatist, 
past  and  present,  he  wanted  his  work  to  be 
judged  in  the  theater,  for  which  it  was  written, 
rather  than  in  the  library.  His  latest  comedy, 
'  Kate, '  was  publisht  only  because  it  was  not  likely 
to  be  acted  immediately,  as  it  called  for  a  cast  of 
291 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

competent  actors  not  easily  obtainable  now  that 
the  star-system  has  been  reduced  to  the  absurd. 
In  his  conversation  he  liked  to  dwell  .on  the 
resemblance  between  the  art  of  the  dramatist 
and  the  art  of  the  architect,  since  the  first  duty 
in  both  is  to  consider  the  planning.  Solidity  of 
construction  is  as  important  to  a  play  as  it  is  to  a 
house.  And  he  held  also  that  true  literary  merit 
was  to  be  sought  in  integrity  of  workmanship 
and  in  veracity  of  character-drawing.  He  main- 
tained that  literature  in  the  drama  should  not  be 
external, — as  so  many  merely  literary  critics,  un- 
familiar with  the  theater,  seem  to  think, — but 
internal.  It  is  not  a  matter  of  rhetoric  applied 
on  the  outside,  but  a  question  of  sincerity  of 
purpose  and  honesty  of  presentation  within  the 
play  itself.  He  never  descended  to  decorate  his 
dialog  with  pretty  speeches,  existing  only  for 
their  own  sake.  He  never  enameled  the  talk  of 
his  characters  with  detachable  witticisms,  clever 
sayings,  extracted  from  the  note-book  and  as 
effective  in  one  play  as  in  another.  His  humor- 
ous touches  were  always  the  expression  of  char- 
acter and  situation.  He  had  been  greatly  pleased 
with  Mr.  William  Archer's  keen  remark  that  the 
good  things  in  the  dialog  of  one  of  his  comedies 
had  bloomed  there  naturally  "like  blossoms  on 
a  laburnum,"  and  were  not  stuck  on  arbitrarily 
"like  candles  on  a  Christmas-tree." 
292 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

His  characters  say  what  they  ought  to  say, 
and  in  so  doing  they  reveal  themselves.  He 
never  sacrificed  to  mere  phrase-making  ;  and 
yet  he  had  a  mastery  of  phrase  and  a  certainty 
of  stroke.  If  he  refrained  from  decking  his  dia- 
log with  flowers  of  speech,  it  was  not  because 
he  had  no  poetry  in  him,  no  invention,  no  imagi- 
nation. Invention  he  had  in  abundance,  and 
also  not  a  little  of  the  larger  informing  and  in- 
terpreting imagination.  There  is  pure  poetry, 
for  instance,  but  in  action  rather  than  in  words, 
in  the  funeral  scene  of  '  Shenandoah,'  where  the 
soldier  father,  all  unknowing,  walks  reverently 
behind  the  body  of  his  erring  son,  who  has  been 
redeemed  by  a  heroic  death, — a  picture  of  un- 
spoken pathos  which  must  linger  in  the  memo- 
ries of  all  who  ever  beheld  the  play. 

In  dealing  with  American  life  in  the  drama, 
poetically  and  realistically,  Bronson  Howard  was 
a  pioneer ;  and  every  one  who  seeks  to  evaluate 
his  work  must  keep  in  mind  constantly  the  fact 
that  it  was  done  in  a  transition  period.  During 
his  life  he  saw  the  theater  in  this  country  change 
with  a  swiftness  he  could  not  dare  to  hope  for 
when  he  began  to  write  for  the  stage ;  and  no 
one  was  more  influential  than  he  in  bringing 
about  this  transformation.  Forty  years  ago  the 
American  theater  was  in  a  condition  of  colonial 
dependence  upon  the  British  theater,  altho  this 

293 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

was  a  period  of  blank  emptiness  in  the  British 
drama.  While  the  novel  was  flourishing  in 
England,  and  while  Thackeray  and  Dickens  and 
George  Eliot  were  adorning  prose-fiction,  litera- 
ture and  the  drama  had  been  divorced.  The 
English-speaking  stage  was  then  a  hotbed  of 
unhealthy  unreality,  since  it  was  occupied  by 
foreign  plays,  the  plots  of  which  had  been  vio- 
lently wrenched  into  an  external  conformity  with 
British  propriety.  Sardou's  essentially  Gallic 
Tattes  de  Mouches'  and  'Nos  Intimes'  and 
'Dora'  were  made  over  into  British  plays,  tainted 
with  incurable  falsity  to  the  facts  of  life.  Now- 
adays a  French  drama  is  translated  only,  and 
it  remains  French  in  character;  but  forty  years 
ago,  or  even  thirty,  it  was  arbitrarily  transmog- 
rified into  a  bastard  British  drama. 

And  these  British  perversions  of  French  pieces 
were  then  the  staple  of  the  American  stage.  The 
case  would  have  been  sad  enough  if  our  theaters 
had  been  given  over  solely  to  reproductions  of 
British  society,  so  different  from  our  own  in  its 
ideals ;  but  it  was  infinitely  worse  when  our  stage 
was  filled  with  nondescript  pieces  which  mis- 
represented British  society.  The  American 
managers  were  not  to  blame  for  this,  since  there 
were  then  no  American  playwrights;  and  they 
were  excusable  if  they  insisted  on  the  London 
hall-mark.  Augustin  Daly  first,  and  secondly 
294 


BRONSON   HOWARD 

A.  M.  Palmer,  began  to  import  the  Parisian  suc- 
cesses direct,  presenting  them  frankly  in  trans- 
lation; and  they  sought  diligently  for  original 
American  plays.  This  policy  left  Lester  Wallack 
sadly  at  sea,  accustomed  as  he  had  been  to  fol- 
low blindly  in  the  footsteps  of  our  British  cousins; 
and  Wallack's  had  been  for  years  the  leading 
theater  of  the  leading  American  city.  I  recall 
Wallack's  plaintive  tone  when  he  said  to  me 
thirty  years  ago,  "I  used  to  get  along  very  well, 
with  the  latest  London  success  and  a  new  play 
now  and  then  by  Dion  or  by  John" — Boucicault 
and  Brougham — "and  an  old  comedy  or  two. 
But  now,  I  really  don't  know  what  they  want!" 
The  British  tradition  seemed  so  natural  to  Lester 
Wallack,  so  inevitable,  that  when  Bronson  How- 
ard, in  his  'prentice  days,  took  him  a  piece  called 
'  Drum-Taps,' — which  was  to  supply  more  than 
one  comedy-scene  to  the  later  'Shenandoah,' — 
the  New  York  manager  did  not  dare  to  risk  a 
play  on  so  American  a  theme  as  the  Civil  War. 
He  returned  it  to  the  young  author,  saying, 
"Couldn't  you  make  it  the  Crimea?"  But 
even  the  hunger  of  a  young  dramatist  to  have  a 
play  performed  could  not  tempt  Bronson  Howard 
to  deprive  his  work  of  all  its  significance. 

Other  managers  there  were  who  had  more 
courage;  and  in  time  Bronson  Howard  got  his 
chance  and  proved  himself,  and  opened  the  way 
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BRONSON   HOWARD 

for  the  younger  men  who  have  come  after  him. 
Whether  his  plays  will  long  survive  him,  time 
alone  can  tell.  Perhaps  the  '  Henrietta,'  with  its 
virility,  its  hearty  humor,  and  its  ingenuity  of 
stagecraft,  will  last  longest.  Perhaps  his  only 
one-act  comedy,  the  delicate  and  delightful  'Old 
Love-Letters, '  will  prove  more  tempting  to  the 
next  generation.  Perhaps  his  last  comedy, 
'Kate/ when  we  see  it  on  the  stage,  will  turn 
out  to  be  his  masterpiece.  But  whatever  the 
fate  of  his  plays  in  the  future,  the  place  that 
Bronson  Howard  will  hold  in  the  history  of 
the  American  drama  is  secure;  and  secure  also 
is  his  place  in  the  memory  of  all  who  had  the 
good  fortune  to  possess  his  friendship. 

(•908.) 


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